Unheard
by skullanddog
Summary: When Arkham Asylum becomes the stage of a series of brutal murders, the GCPD blame the mob. One forensic scientist thinks he knows better. This one chance to prove himself may come at the cost of Ed's morality - but it's a small price to pay, right?
1. Shooting the Breeze

_**A/N:**__ With all the crazy character development going on with Gotham, I thought I'd have a stab at bridging Ed's character from an odd-but-sweet good guy to a homicidal maniac. What! Doesn't that sound like fun? This story is the first step of Ed's lifetime of poor decision making skills. It's also a hard-boiled moider mystery in twelve chapters (plus a short epilogue.) Enjoy!_

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Chapter 1: Shooting the Breeze

The old asylum dominated the hill above the bay, its back on the world, its eyes on Gotham City. Sprawling, spike-backed and grey, it groaned in the breeze, loose tiles and mortar dust flung away over the steel blue bay. Police vehicles clustered in the open yard between the sheer-faced cell blocks and the rambling, crumbling mansion. Behind them, at the mouth of the old northern bridge, the black gates hung open to Arkham Asylum.

At the mansion's highest point, the clock tower, three bodies were suspended by their ankles from a length of rusted wire. Black thread sewed the mouths into a tight, blood-crusted line. It was the second time bodies had been hung from the tower in a week.

"This, again? I thought we did this last Friday." Harvey Bullock, GCPD, passed the binoculars to the detective beside him. "Man, I wish they'd stop swaying around like that."

The usually unflappable Harvey was green behind his scruffy beard. Clean-cut and sharp-eyed, Jim Gordon saw why. He lowered the binoculars quickly. "The crows don't seem to mind it."

They shuffled aside for a pair of crime scene investigators bearing a stretcher across the courtyard. More CSIs and uniforms were scattered around the broad yard, as many as the weeds poking through the concrete. The nearest were arguing about the best way to reach the bodies. By navigating through the rotted mansion or scaling the clock tower from the outside? Last week one of the CSIs on body retrieval had fallen through a rotten wooden step, breaking her leg and disabling an entire flight of stairs in the process.

Harvey and Gordon skirted past the mansion's main entrance and a small enclosed plaza, through the tangled grass and low bushes towards the clock tower on the mansion's southeast corner. The corpses had an impressive view out over the city, across the dark waters where the river met the bay. A narrow ledge wrapped around the tower's foot buffered it from the drop into the bay. The tower formed the last pole in a twelve foot high fence built right to the edge of the island, capped in a triple row of razor wire and obscured by wind-torn trees.

A sharp sea breeze rattled the razor wire. Any abseiling venture to reach the bodies would be a lively one: that wind would pluck you right off the ropes. Assuming the grappling gear held to the crumbling mortar in the first place. It was nothing Gordon wanted to put his faith in. He peered over the edge of the promontory, paling a little at the fifty foot drop into the rock-fanged sea.

"Why's it always have to be here?" Harvey stayed a good few paces away from the cliff's edge, one hand clamping his fedora to his unruly blond hair. He kicked the dirt. The wind threw it back in his face. He spat, "Man, I hate this stinking place. I hope they never reopen it. Can you imagine being hauled out whenever one of the looneys gets hold of a gun? Shit. I want no part of that. I don't know who's hanging these bodies up here, but second time in a week they've landed me out here, I'm gonna shoot him right in the ass."

"Your pursuit of justice is inspiring, as always," Gordon told him flatly.

Harvey squawked, "Look, are you gonna climb up there-"

"It could be worse. You could be the killer," a voice called behind him. Harvey shot two feet into the air and came down snarling into the expectantly smiling face of the on-scene forensic scientist, Edward Nygma.

"Ed!" Harvey barked. "You _do not_ sneak up on people on the edge of a cliff!"

Ed peered over the cliff's edge. He looked up at the bodies silhouetted against the drab morning sky. Crows and chattered and flapped between the corpses. Clouds pushing east over the mansion made the clock tower appear as if it were collapsing on top of them. The three men shuffled back a pace.

"As I was saying," said Ed, his genial demeanour unimpaired by the sight of the bodies nor Harvey glaring daggers at him, "it could be worse. You could be the murderer. Imagine having to sneak in here at the dead of night, lugging those bodies upstairs, in the dark, and with the alterations Miss May made to the staircase last week. It's amazing our perpetrator isn't trapped in the floorboards."

"If you kick any torsos on the stairs, let me know. Hey!" Harvey waved to a CSI who had appeared alongside the hanging bodies. Somebody must have repaired the clock tower staircase. The CSI swore and eased back from the railing. "Sorry to scare ya, lady. But hey, while you're up there, hunt those crows, will ya? Giving me the creeps."

Ed trailed after the detectives. Despite being long-legged and lean, Ed was prone to shuffling wherever he went, with a puppy's pinballing attention between dreaminess and obsessive focus. "Okay, Detective Bullock. What's quieter the louder it gets?"

"I dunno. Mac and cheese?"

"No. The answer is-"

"Ed!" Harvey snapped. He stared at the scientist until Ed shrugged and busied himself in his notebook. He turned away. "Thank you."

The mansion doors stood open, uninviting. Lion heads or maybe some weird, carnivorous sea creatures had been carved into the heavy wood. A few electric lights were running off a generator in the foyer, but otherwise the place was dark. Their footsteps creaked on floorboards black with mould, the carpet like wet moss where it hadn't rotted away entirely. Papers littered the floor. Some may have been torn from the bookshelves in the record room deeper into the old wreck. Others seemed simply to have been dumped: patient profiles and maintenance reports discarded like flotsam as the previous tenants made good their escape.

Gordon peered into the shadowy corners of the mouldering foyer, pursuing the thinning groups of CSIs and uniforms through the maze of halls and stairwells to the tower. Wan shafts of sunlight pierced the dusty, broken windows, scattering a hazy illumination around the ground floor, a million strands of spider web. The pockets of gloom were deep, in places the shadows impenetrable, the mould and shadow stirring deeper pools of blackness than any moonless night. It was a lonely place, a pestilent place, where mildew was queen, the splendour of the vast mansion corrupted long before it had been forgotten.

They left the foyer for the main hall, then moved into the record room, tearing a tunnel through spider webs. The ceilings were vaulted, but the windows so encrusted with filth they were required to proceed with flashlights. Harvey asked, to distract himself, "Jim, who found our bodies?"

Gordon expelled a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding "A couple of fishermen. Their trawler passed close by the island around dawn."

Harvey grunted. "Probably on the lookout after last week's headlines. _Mad Stitcher Strikes Arkham_, that it?"

"Something like that."

"Reporters oughta have more sense. Ah, maybe they do. This is obviously a mob hit. Guess I wouldn't report that, either."

At the mention of the mob, Gordon brushed the butt of his handgun. They were only a few hours past dawn. The killer might still be here. Waiting. Perhaps the killings were no more than a ruse to draw the police into this decrepit place. Rig a couple of shotguns over doorways, separate the investigators, and _BAM!_ A place like this was full of traps.

He drew a shaky breath, glancing beside him to Ed. Generally the scientist was a good choice to notice anything askew about a situation. However, today Ed had his head to the side, reading the spines of binders jammed into the discarded shelves. He tripped over a bulge in the carpet, and Gordon gave up on him.

They found no tripwires between the tall shelves. Gordon looked, found none as they ducked an alcove, winding up a mossy marble staircase, and none again on the side passage leading to the clock tower. By time they were creaking up the repaired tower stairwell, he had almost convinced himself they were safe.

Yet his breath left him in a rush as they stepped through the narrow door onto the tower balcony. He stood there for a moment, doing as Harvey was, sucking in fresh air, drinking in the sunlight twinkling on the bay waters. A lone CSI leant against the concrete railing.

"It's all yours, boys," she sung, gathering her kit. Breaking waves boomed on the wind, the trio of bodies shivering on their wire. "I'll show the others up."

Harvey blocked her. "Shouldn't they know the way? You guys just spent a week here dusting for prints."

"That's the problem," the CSI agreed. "The crime scene is the entire asylum. We've found thousands of prints. Hundreds more skin, hair and fluid samples. We've been so busy cataloguing data that no one has had a chance to move around."

"No idea who our perp is, then? I really wanna shoot this guy."

The CSI nodded to Ed. "Not my department. Ask your forensic."

Harvey let her skip around him into the tower. Gordon and Ed were already by the rail. Gordon followed the wire rigging the bodies. It wound around the tall stone post caps on two corners of the square balcony, then yanked sharply downwards to wrap around the railing, probably to prevent the weight of the bodies tearing the post caps into the sea. The wire sagged between caps, but it had been tightly secured, leaving the victims' ankles at eye level. Each of the three was secured by one ankle, the weight of the free leg casting the bodies at odd angles against the railing, decreasing their resistance to the wind gusting up the face of the tower.

What Harvey could see of the ankles wasn't pleasant. As thick as it was, the wire had cut right through to the bone.

Gordon shook his head. "How the hell did our guy lift these up here?"

Harvey shrugged. "Maybe the Stitcher is a team? Or a body builder. Hey, Ed, don't touch that!"

Too late. Ed's gloved fingers pulled at the bruised and lacerated flesh of a wire-bitten ankle – and the skin ripped right off the foot like a sock, the wire slipping over the wet muscle beneath, the body vanishing in a spray of coagulated blood.

Gordon, Ed and Harvey peered over the balcony. Ed flinched as the body struck the rocky promontory four floors below.

"Oops."

Harvey squinted at him. "You know that's tampering with the evidence."

Ed shot him a glance.

"I'm just sayin'. We got three of 'em, right? You're allowed to demolish one."

Lips pursed, Ed moved to the leftmost body. He frowned at it but didn't touch it as it pirouetted in the wind. "Looks like she bled out after being hanged. Agonising way to go."

"It's gotta be a mob hit," Harvey told Gordon. "Look at that. No eyes, even. Get outta here, you filthy crows!" he waved an arm at the bird settling on a post cap. "Probably Maroni. This is Maroni's style. Violent and obvious. Vic's probably a building surveyor. She assigned work to Falcone's men. Maroni had her taken out as a message he's not missing out on his slice of the Arkham pie."

Ed peered over the railing, careful not to touch the body. The woman's skin was grey. Her face crow-pecked and eyeless. The most colour on either corpse was the stream of dried blood running from the ankle down the length of the body.

He took a recorder from his black GCPD jacket, muttering into it in what seemed to be a shrill apology for his earlier indiscretion. "Victim is a Caucasian woman in her late forties. Short blond hair, navy pencil skirt, stockings, white blouse. No shoes and no jacket. Bruising on arms, legs and neck. Probably bled to death after being beaten unconscious and hanged."

Harvey looked up from his casual examination of the third body. "Maybe you ought to focus on the obvious. You know – the mouth sewn shut?"

Ed waited for the wind to pull the woman's face away from the tower. Sutures welded her lips. They formed thick, ugly, zigzag lines in the flesh. Bruising around the mouth suggested the victim had been alive for the procedure. Ed glanced at Harvey. "If this is a mob hit, why sew the mouth shut?"

"Uh, duh, so they can't speak out against Moroni."

"But what can a corpse say? Maybe it's symbolic." Ed tipped his head. "It's a puzzle we're meant to solve."

Harvey glowered at him, at the bodies. "There's no puzzle. They needed to be quiet. That's why. These three and the first two, they all had something to say. Something Moroni didn't want getting out. The shut mouths are symbolic – for shut your mouth!"

"But-"

"Harvey," said Gordon, "if your theory is right, maybe whoever did this was doing more than protecting Moroni's share of the investment. Maybe the message is to give Moroni _more_ than his share. He's spooking future contractors into taking his side."

"Actually," said Ed, "that's a hypothesis, not a –"

"Ed!" Harvey slapped his face in exasperation. "We're the detectives here. You work on how they died. We'll figure out who did it. All right?"

The detectives moved towards the stairs. Ed stared at the body. With a vicious jab he un-paused the recorder. "Mouth is sewn shut. Looks like old surgical wire, may have been found on the Asylum premises. May or may not be a part of a larger puzzle..."

In the clock tower, Harvey rolled his eyes. "Some people. You'd have to sew their lips up to get some peace."

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_**A/N:**__ Like it? Review it! Like, review it! Like it, review it. Review it! Yeah! Subscribe to this story and review it! See you next week, enjoy Gotham you lucky damn Americans!_


	2. Hush Hush

_**A/N:** Here we gooooooooo!_

Chapter 2: Hush Hush

Gotham City was split two ways: between stately and omniscient Falcone in the north, slapdash and lucky Maroni in the south. Each don had installed political figures in both the public eye and out of it, minor bosses like lordlings in their separate holds. If Gotham had any exports, it was crime. If it had any imports, it was political dissent. A killer like the Arkham Stitcher could readily slip through the blind spot of justice, if it meant smoother business for the mob.

Edward Nygma leant over the second floor balcony of the buzzing Gotham City Police Department headquarters, admiring the chaos. With a coffee cup in one hand and a stack of reports in the other, he was an island of calm in a fitful sea of rushing bodies, shouts for files, ringing phones, wailing prisoners, and the daily struggle for doughnuts.

He spotted Harvey Bullock in the throng of the doughnut wars, stealing a yellow-glazed ring from a secretary and placing it under his hat for safekeeping. Ed knew many scandalous things about the GCPD, and he knew that Detective Bullock always had room for a doughnut under his hat.

Something else he knew: Harvey was dead wrong about the Stitcher.

Four days after the second murders, the bodies were ready to be shipped to funeral homes. Ed had missed his chance to perform an autopsy. Oh, he could have sneaked into the morgue while the Medical Examiner was out – he even considered returning to the station during the graveyard shift. But in the end he couldn't risk it. Being caught dissecting bodies so soon after the last incident was more than his job was worth. Even if he was just trying to help.

Well then. He'd have to find another way to convince Harvey to listen.

He met the detective on the stairs with a smile. "What's much sought after, best fried, and warming rapidly?"

Harvey eyed him warily. "It'd better not be me."

Ed blinked. He fell into pace behind Harvey. "It's your doughnut."

"Oh." Harvey slouched behind his desk. Absorbed in his computer on the desk opposite, Gordon grunted a good morning. Harvey removed the doughnut from his pocket and pushed it into his mouth, licking icing from his grubby fingers. He stared at Ed. "Well, what?"

"You're wrong about the Stitcher's killings."

As predicted, Harvey sprayed doughnut crumbs all over his keyboard. He choked, and Gordon frowned over at Ed. "Haven't we talked about this? We have five deaths at the Asylum in a week. The mafia haven't stopped fighting over the Arkham restoration contracts: I'm with Harvey. This is big, and it's secret. It's a mob job."

"Hmm." Ed pushed his half cup of coffee across the desk to Harvey, who spluttered it down and finally stopped choking. "Don't you think it's interesting that only one of the victims was under contract to either Maroni or Falcone's companies? That's Jarod Augustine, a safety inspector for Maroni's Big Red Construction Solutions. We have no clear links between Augustine and the other victims. So I've been wondering-"

Harvey rubbed his face. "Oh my God."

"-the method of execution doesn't match Maroni's pattern. If the victims were in the way, why not just dump them in the ocean? And why sew the mouths shut? We could be looking at a politically motivated crime."

Harvey grabbed Ed's hand and slapped the coffee cup into it. "_We_ aren't looking into anything," he growled. "Scram, will ya?"

But Gordon frowned. "Maybe he has a point. Why don't you see what you can come up with, Ed? See if there are any political ties between these people."

Ed glanced at Harvey, who shook his head at his partner. "Jim, we don't even have a positive ID on all the vics yet. And you, Ed. You don't know their political ties. You don't even know who they are." He shook his hands. "It's a mob hit! Maroni's man probably found white ants, and that was enough to get him whacked. Jesus. Why doesn't anyone listen to me?"

_But their mouths were sewn shut!_ Ed bit his lip. "Joon Myeong Song was an anaesthetist for Gotham General. He helped run a food van for the homeless. He has no association with Maroni. If I could have done those autopsies-"

"What, you'd have dissected the political affiliation valve?" Harvey demanded.

Ed clutched his stack of files. "I might've gotten us an idea of where they were before they were murdered. Political rally versus dinner with Maroni, for one." Seeing Harvey about to bark, he hurried, "Those people had something to say, Detective. Something the people of Gotham need to hear."

Harvey's mouth was a hard line. It lasted about two seconds before he erupted, slamming his fist on the desk, bouncing his keyboard. "Of course they had something to say! The wrong damn thing to say!"

"Not everything is to do with Maroni-"

"Then prove it!" Harvey roared. Face white with the hangover Ed was making hellish. He turned his shoulder to Ed, burying himself in his computer screen. "Give me some proof, or for Chrissake, give me a break!"

Ed gripped his coffee mug in a bloodless hand. "Fine."

He spun on his heel and hurried downstairs before Gordon could finish his placating sentiment. Ed hurried through the press of bodies, clinging to his files, determined not to drop them when he bumped shoulders and tripped on potted plants. He zigzagged out the station and into a dim corridor.

There he slowed, taking a moment to collect himself. Outside the archives the corridor was cool and quiet, a blessed break from the din of the station. He raised his hand to knock, thought better of it, and let himself in. The smell of musty paper swamped over him.

Kristen glanced up sharply from a filing cabinet. The stack of manila folders atop the cabinet told Ed she thought she was filing. Really all she was doing was creating more mess for the next record keeper to contend with, but after his confrontation with Harvey, Ed thought better than to tell her this.

Plus, experience had shown that telling Kristen that she was no good at her job was the kind of thing that hurt her feelings, thus reducing her affinity for Ed. Maybe. The clues were subtle, but they were there.

One such subtle clue was the way Kristen's eyes showed white the whole way round when she recognised Ed. She clutched her folders to her blouse. "Oh, it's you."

Ed gave her his absolute best megawatt smile. "Hi! How are you today, Miss Kringle?"

"Fine," she replied. Adjusting her glasses on her cute little nose, her gaze drifting him up and down, lips parted, brows knitted. She said, "Are you shaking?"

He was. He was in fact shaking to such an extent that the files were ruffling audibly in his hands. "Um. I'm not so much shaking," he lied slowly, attempting to gauge her reaction as he spoke, a doomed idea from the beginning, "as I am excited to be in your presence. You're just ah, exciting to be around. Unpredictable. Crazy."

Kristen wrinkled her nose. She had seemed as though she might approach him, but now made herself content by the distant cabinet. "Right. I'm the crazy one. Is there anything I can help you with, Mr Nygma? I'm kind of busy."

Ed had barely dared to show face in the archives in the last month. He wasn't officially banned, as he was from the morgue. The thought of Kristen and her friends laughing at him was reprimand enough. The last thing he wanted to do was give them more ammunition.

And so he thought the words through several times before saying them aloud, Kristen's face drooping by the second. "I need whatever you've got on Arkham Asylum. Particularly personal records for anyone arrested for protesting its opening, or closing, whatever. Also any ex-patients with a criminal history."

"Pretty sure that's all of them," said Kristen.

She didn't seem to be terribly irritated with him, however. Ed pressed on, encouraged. "Well, uh, any murderers, for a start. Escaped, deranged killers, also good. Especially for those living in Gotham."

Kristen nodded. "That's a lot to go through, but I think I can help. How soon do you need the files?"

Ed had stayed against the door in preparation for a hasty escape. Now, though, it seemed his escape may not be rushed, or perhaps even necessary. In fact, as far as he could recall, this was the longest he'd ever spoken to Kristen without her reaching for her taser.

He gave her a smile he feared was more a grimace of uncertainty. "As soon as possible, of course. But you're busy, so ... how about tomorrow? Seven pm. Midtown. At the March Penguin."

Colour flared in Kristen's cheeks. "Are you asking me out?"

"No." Ed hesitated. Was that disappointment she was expressing? "But I will shout you dinner if you show up."

It was Kristen's turn to pause. "You mean, show up on time?"

Uh. Had he? "Uh huh," he said. "Sure."

Kristen touched her hair. "Well, I am a little strapped this month. Your shout?"

"My shout."

"I'll see you there."

"See you."

"Bye, Edward."

Ed fled into the hallway. He slammed the door and fell against it, holding his hands up in front of him. The files shuddered in his bloodless grip. But he couldn't care less.

He had just asked Kristen Kringle on a date.

_And she had said yes!_

* * *

That night, feeling good, Ed skipped his usual train home and instead caught the 819 bus to Arkham Asylum.

The bus didn't cross the water, instead stopping by the new bridge spanning from Midtown to Arkham Island. Gotham City was broken into four large pieces determined by its rivers, arranged from north to south. Northernmost was Old Gotham, or Uptown. Southernmost was Downtown, where the GCPD headquarters could be found. Between them was Midtown, and wedged between Midtown, Uptown and the bay separating Gotham from the mainland, was Arkham Island.

The old bridge and gate were accessed from Uptown, once upon a time the only entry to the island. However, in the Asylum's heyday, a second bridge from Midtown had been considered necessary, hence the low-lying span of concrete Ed now walked.

A sleek silver gate hugged the northern end of the bridge, blocking road traffic, not that any cars bothered to drive up here. Wind-blasted fishermen collected along the bridge's length, a group of kids knocked rocks into the river with crooked golf sticks, and Ed walked past them all, ignored.

The gate rose steep, impenetrable before him. Big red signs for Maroni's excavator company were plastered over the bars and tacked to the twelve foot fence. Whoever'd erected the fence had built it right to the edge of the land, making it impossible to circumnavigate the island without swimming.

Unless ... Ed pried back a sign and pushed his briefcase carefully between the bars. Six inches between bars. Barely enough room for the briefcase, certainly not enough for him to squeeze through.

He left his briefcase on the Arkham side of the fence, moving to the edge of the bridge. When the tide was in, the bridge was no more than a few feet from the water. Now the tide was out and purple dusk glimmered on the exposed beach. Ed stepped over the low iron railing and dropped off the bridge, coming down harder than he anticipated on the wet rocks. He slipped, cutting his hand on a shell, bending ungracefully and recovering his balance before he went completely ass-over.

Nursing his hand, nose wrinkling at the powerful stench of dead fish and rotting seaweed, he climbed clockwise around the island through the shallow water and rocky beaches. A hundred yards from the bridge the short rise to Arkham Island had become a twenty foot cliff and was rapidly ascending. Worse, his little spit of land had reached its end, dropping off into the deep, cold water of Gotham Bay.

"What's five foot tall, stinks of fish, and can give you cholera?"

Ed grinned. No, Arkham could not be circumnavigated on foot. His hunch, however, had proven correct. He was right at the mouth of the river, where the waters separating Uptown and Midtown chugged into the bay. Built into the cliff wall beside him was a sewage drain tall enough for him to walk through. It was coated in black slime, reeking of dead fish and rotting weeds, and he'd have to stoop, but was otherwise a perfectly serviceable entry to the Asylum.

For a long minute he stood there on the slimy rocks, wondering if he should go in. He wasn't sure exactly what he thought he'd find. The bodies were gone, but the memories of the murders were not.

A chill ran the course of his spine. The drain was a well of utter darkness. He might find an access ladder to Gotham somewhere in there, or he might not. He might get out before the tide rose, or he might not.

Either way, he knew. The answers to Arkham's killer lay somewhere on the island.

* * *

Common sense, or maybe fear, won him over. Ed retrieved his briefcase from the gate, pausing only briefly as he felt some keen, crude eye fall upon him. He looked over his shoulder – but it was dark now, and even the fishermen had gone home.

"Imagining things," he whispered. He pulled his briefcase under his arm and hurried alone across the bridge.

By time he hit Midtown, the feeling of being watched had dissipated. He skipped the bus stop and was almost at the train station when his mental map of the city flashed an alert.

Fish Mooney's club was around here somewhere. Ed took the next right and emerged on a boulevard of glittering gold lights. Mooney's place was halfway along the block, across the street from Ed. He drifted towards it, admiring the dancing neon. MOONEY'S CLUB splashed in crimson above a nondescript stairwell leading to an underground entrance. Classy, or so Ed figured. His experience with nightclubs was admittedly lacklustre.

Laneways he knew better. He spied a narrow lane running alongside the club, surprisingly clean and uncluttered. A couple of men in black shared a cigarette outside a rectangle of light that must have been a side entry. There weren't even many bloodstains on the concrete.

So Fish Mooney kept a tidy laneway. Fish, now there was an interesting character. One of Don Falcone's people. In a city like Gotham she was the equivalent of the mayor of Midtown. Meaning she was squeezed between Falcone in the north and Maroni in the south, probably hating them both with equal vigour. Her part in Arkham would be secondary – in fact she might be overlooked entirely.

"Ha," said Ed, to nobody. "Interesting."

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_**A/N:**__ Thank you for the reviews/ follows :3 We have a story to tell here, gosh darn it, and it's people like you helping it be told. We're gonna go some crazy places and poke around in Ed's brain like we don't even know what's in there. Like we don't even care! Yeah! Til next week! Review if you were like, "Omg Kristen said YES?"_


	3. More'n You Could Poke A Stick At

_**A/N:**__ Hello Gothamites! My gravest apologies for missing last week. I was on holidays and without internet. But here it is. The long-awaited (really?) third chapter of Edward Nygma versus Stitcher, Riddler versus serial killer, who will win, who will be victorious, will Kristen really go on that date, is Penguin really a bird, what colour are Harvey's underpants, find out, find out all that and less, find it out right here!_

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Chapter 3: More'n You Could Poke A Stick At

"Okay, you have three wolves, ten sheep, and a patch of grass. You don't want the sheep to eat the grass. What do you do?"

Harvey, in the passenger seat of the GCPD squad car, held up a finger. "I know this one. You mow the lawn."

Ed licked his lips. He could see this wouldn't be easy. "No, then the sheep will starve. Say you're one of the three wolves. The other two wolves are larger than you. They want the sheep to eat the grass and grow fat. But you're a small wolf. If the other wolves get any bigger, you're next on the menu. What do you do then?"

"I uh," Harvey scratched his hat. He balled up his face. "Screw me sideways, Ed! I've got no idea."

Gordon drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. "So you can't cut the grass?"

"The sheep will starve if you do."

Gordon nodded. "And then I'll starve."

Ed smirked. "Yep."

"What if you kill all the sheep?" Harvey guessed. "The meat would keep you alive for a while. Maybe after that you'd uh, have to eat grass?"

"Or you could eat the other wolves," Gordon suggested.

And these were the best minds the Gotham Police had to offer.

Two blocks from the GCPD station and they were caught in traffic. Much to Harvey's chagrin, Ed had hitched a ride with them back from a double-murder suicide at a hotel in Uptown. Ed wasn't so much interested in the crime scene as he was in wringing information from the detectives.

Harvey and Gordon had spent the day before interviewing friends and family of the Stitcher's victims, eight interviews in total with no certain connections between any of the victims. Ed had done a little fishing around the station, largely in the form of circulating mislabelled folders. When the tides of bureaucracy washed the folders back on his desk, they contained copies of the Medical Examiner's post-mortem reports for the five victims. If there were any clues to the Stitcher's motives, they were in those interviews and reports. Ed was twitching to get back to the station and put them together.

Harvey twisted the radio on, drowning the police radio blabber under David Bowie's _Space Odyssey_. Gordon went to switch it back and Harvey slapped his hand away.

"No. Come on, man. This is my song."

Gordon threw him a glare. "You say that about every David Bowie song."

"The guy is practically singing my legend. Don't turn it off!"

Gordon sat back as Harvey launched into a moaning rendition of his own stolen legend. The car crept to the next light post, and the traffic froze again. Gordon let out a noisy breath.

Ed tapped his shoulder. "Did you want to hear the answer?"

The detective held up a hand. "Hold on." He flicked the radio back to the police channel. "Sorry, man," he said to a distraught Harvey, "I just can't take you moaning anymore."

He turned up the static. A woman's voice spluttered through. "-units to Arkham Asylum. I repeat, all available homicide units to Arkham Asylum."

"Hell," Gordon said. He unhooked the radio mic from the console. "GCPD, this is Detective Gordon. What's the situation at Arkham?"

Harvey thumped the dash. "We're stuck in traffic, Jim. Whaddaya gonna do? Fly there?"

A woman's voice droned through the radio. "Detective Gordon, there's been another body found at the Asylum. Can you attend?"

"I'm on it." Gordon slapped the mic back in place. He hit reverse, crumpling the hood of the beat-up Datsun behind him, flicked on the sirens, threw the car into first, and screeched around in a semi-circle across three lanes of blaring horns.

"Jesus, Jim!" Harvey grabbed his fedora in one hand and the Jesus handle in the other. Seatbeltless, Ed slid into the door.

"Sorry!" Gordon called, though he didn't sound apologetic in the least.

* * *

They punched it across the city in record time.

It turned out you couldn't trust dispatch, either: there were two bodies on scene. Both were dangling upside-down from the eaves of the back side of the intensive treatment ward, one of the three big buildings opening onto the main forecourt.

Ed tagged the detectives around the back of the treatment ward, across the overgrown yard. Hanks of grey cloud hung low over the island, beading his jacket with condensation. Yellow crime scene tape could be seen everywhere, sagging with moisture, like spider webs in long grass.

The yard formed the island's heart, an undulating mass of broken concrete and beds of weeds. A small cemetery and enclosed gardens were packed away to the north. The mansion with its adjoining clock tower sat stolidly, ignored, to the south. Police vehicles scattered around a lone guard tower between the mansion and the backs of the main buildings, like sheer cliff faces studded with empty windows. To the west, what might have been a view of the bay was interrupted by mountains of loose stone pushed aside by the recent construction.

Ed nodded to the gravel hills. "The rock break must stop most of the breeze from the bay." He sniffed. "You can actually smell the bodies today."

Harvey caught his grin and scowled. "Yeah, the perfume of death. Just what I like to wake up to."

They gathered beneath the swinging heads of the corpses, listening to the gutters groan against the weight of the bodies. A buzzing black cloud of flies obscured the faces entirely. Blood congealed on the broken cement beneath them, elongated pools describing the orbit of the bodies around the fulcrum of their ankles, a red welcome mat on the doorstep of the ward's main entrance.

Ed pulled a pair of latex gloves and a swab set from his forensic kit and got to work. A few CSIs stood back from the ward, cameras flashing.

"These guys smell like they've been dead a couple of days." Gordon checked the rock piles obscuring the bay. "Line of sight from the water is next to none. We're enclosed on four sides; the mansion south, the rocks west, buildings to the north and east. Security might have made it impossible for the Stitcher to hang the vics from the clock tower, but he still went to the trouble of hanging them in sight of anyone on the island." He thought for a moment. "The mouths are sewn shut again. The GCPD and the security patrols are the only people likely to see the bodies here. Is the message for Gotham, or for us?"

"It's not for me," Harvey grunted. "You ever been in the hospital here, Jim? Place was no more than an abattoir. Bullshitters will tell you the cells in the basement were part of the psychiatry ward."

Gordon raised his eyebrows. "What would someone honest tell me?"

"Human experimentation lab." Ice glittered in Harvey's eyes and in his voice. He looked at Gordon. "Some real sick shit went on in this place. You ask me, the best thing that ever happened to Gotham was when they closed it down."

Swabbing blood, Ed peered at Harvey. Curious.

"Nikolas Ozolinsh, 56," Gordon said. "Jarod Augustine, 65. Joon Myeong Song, 59. Peony Norman, 42. And Kym Katee, 48. What do they have in common?"

Harvey's jaw clenched. "Aside from they're our murder victims? Nothing. One was a shrink, one a safety inspector. Hell, Peony Norman was a secretary. The most they had in common was the dog luck to die here."

Ed said, "They were sheep, Detective."

"Not this shit again! Ed-"

But Gordon snapped his fingers. "The small wolf! I'm a small wolf, I want my share of the food supply ... if I kill my enemy's sheep, I can stop him getting stronger. It might not make me bigger, but at least it would screw my opposition."

Harvey squinted hard at them both. "You idiots have lost me completely."

"Fish Mooney," Gordon prompted. "She doesn't want the Arkham project to go ahead. All it's doing is strengthening her enemies."

Ed smirked. "Bingo."

* * *

The detectives didn't wait around the scene, preferring to take their hunch directly to Fish Mooney.

This left Ed, a few other forensic scientists and the CSIs to climb up on the roof of the intensive treatment ward, a feat which involved first gaining access to the locked ward and subsequently navigating its dark and winding corridors.

Dragging the bodies onto the pointed roof proved impossible; the tiles were just too loose underfoot, the guttering not secure. It took them three hours and two trips to the hardware store to rig a pulley system from the roof ridge, and from there to secure the bodies by their knees and lower them ten floors to the ground.

It was wretched, tedious work, made all the less pleasant by the constant swarm of flies buzzing from the bodies to batter the workers. Less pleasant still was the way the tiles slipped underfoot, and sagged and groaned in other places, and the droplets of sleet which coated their necks and the roof in ice.

At least it wasn't windy. Ed, who'd landed the job of cutting the wire from the victims' ankles, left the roof as the bodies were being lowered, making his way back through the maze of bleak corridors. He was either on the ground before the bodies were loaded into the morgue trucks or he'd miss his chance for an examination. He didn't count leaning over a hundred foot drop for an ankles-down view of the corpses as an examination. That was more the Medical Examiner's style. Amateur...

"Oh." Ed pulled up short in a corridor. His torchlight bounced from a tumble of broken boards and collapsed masonry. A dead end.

He backed up. Uh, where was he again? He was sure this was the way. The torch beam swung over water-stained walls, shallow pools on the chipped tiles. Doorways branched off either side of the corridor, glass-paned office doors not unlike the door to the archives. Ed found the staircase he had so recently descended. He trained the torchlight over its decrepit length, unsure if he should retrace his steps, or if this were the right way to go.

"Hello?" he called, just in case he was yards from the entrance. He didn't think so, though. The main foyer had a little cage booth for a secretary, surrounded by holding cells for recent transfers to the ward. It stood out.

His footsteps echoed uncertainly as he left the stairwell behind, torch beam flickering over vacant doorways. It occurred to him that he should just give up and return upstairs. There he could start again, perhaps make the descent in the company of the others forensics. Surely one of them would remember the path down. Ed shouldn't have forgotten it; he was just so damn excited that his clue to Gordon and Harvey had gone somewhere, he had barely paid attention to the ascent.

Part of him could still not believe they'd gone to see Fish Mooney. Of course, if Mooney was pinned with the murders, Gordon and Harvey would take the credit. Ed expected that much. Just because he led them by the hand to that conclusion didn't mean he would be any more appreciated.

They might appreciate him, however, if he went missing in Arkham Asylum.

Ed gulped. He pushed a door on creaking hinges, peering into the room beyond. Just a busted desk and few ancient filing cabinets, no serial killers. He let out his breath.

Okay, he'd descended ten floors. That meant he was on the ground level. Well, at least, he thought he'd gone down ten floors. Ed trained the torch on the end of the corridor. There the walls were tiled to hip height, the plaster above that bright with graffiti. That should mean it was close to the exit: the Asylum was such a place not even the street kids ventured far inside its walls.

His stride quickened as he neared the tiled wall. One of the freshest tags was a cartoon cat's face. Underneath it the words, _CAT WAS ERE!_

There were probably many cats here, Ed thought. He turned left at the end of the corridor, certain now he was upon an exit. Ahead sunlight danced through a hole in the wall. A murky daylight lit the room beyond the T-junction. Rust-coloured light traced the bars of large cages – the holding cells! Funny, he didn't remember a T-junction on the way up. But it had to be it, right?

He burst into the cell room, heart flip-flopping in his chest, moments from freedom, the bodies, the investigation, justice for all – and stopped dead.

There were bodies, all right. Dozens of them. Torsos, legs and arms, carefully separated and in various states of decay, jammed into the holding cells as tight as sardines. The odour of rancid flesh hit Ed in a wall his years as a forensic scientist did nothing to assuage.

The torch cluttered from his hand. He didn't bother to retrieve it.

Instead he turned.

And he ran.

* * *

_**A/N:**__ R&amp;R love you forever._


	4. Business Where You Shouldn't Be

_**A/N:**__ Thank you beautiful readers for your support. I'm having so much fun writing this story, and though I know it's tough to keep pace with a murder story week by week, thank you for making the effort. We're really going to rock some socks and mess with some heads in this story, and I know it will give y'all a kick. On that note, the long-awaited date night has arrived. You go, Ed! The Stitcher will wait for love!_

* * *

Chapter 4: Business Where You Shouldn't Be

"So the Asylum's being used as a mass grave for mob hits."

Captain Sarah Essen formed a tower amid the skyscrapers of paperwork choking her desk. Her head was heavy in her hands. She waited for Ed to nod. When he did, she sighed.

"Great. What a pain in the ass. Forty bodies, was that the estimate? No wonder we haven't been pulling many from the harbour."

"Yes, Captain."

Essen tipped her head to the side. "You okay, Ed? I know you're used to the dead, but hell. That would have scared the shit out of me."

Ed sat with his hands in his lap, the cuff of his jacket pulled discreetly back from his watch. It was 6.40. He'd been in Essen's office for half an hour, most of that time waiting for her to return from her debriefing with the Medical Examiner. "I'm fine." He had twenty minutes to get to Midtown for dinner and reconnaissance with Kristen. Seeing Essen was unconvinced, he smiled. "Really."

If anything, Essen's frown deepened. She sat back in her chair. "Okay. You can go." Ed rose to do just that. Essen held up a finger. "But if you need someone to talk to, come find me."

"Oh, the dead don't bother me," Ed told her, as nonchalantly as he could whilst mentally plotting travel routes, "sometimes the living do. But not the dead."

There was no time to go home to change. The suit he had on would have to suffice. Clattering down the stairs from Essen's office, Ed ran a hand through his hair, sweeping it neatly to the side. He hit the coatroom, swapping his black GCPD jacket for a grey overcoat more suited to the drizzling winter night. His glasses he could polish on the bus ride. And that would have to do.

He caught the bus across the road from the station. Although he had to run to catch it he hesitated on the step up. The bus was crammed full of cops and waitresses. Like so many sardines in a can.

"Buddy, you on or what?" the driver grunted.

Ed shoved a few dollars towards him. "Sorry. Yeah."

The dim streets of Downtown Gotham slid by in a featureless haze. Ed checked his watch compulsively. 6.50. Darn it. There was no way he'd make the March Penguin in time.

He doubted Kristen would wait long for him. She'd already headed home for the day by time Ed, blanket over his shoulders, riding shotgun in a van full of mafia butcher's cuts, arrived back at the station. He'd left the blanket in the van, standing by but not helping as the CSIs unloaded the bits of bodies. Maybe he should have helped, but he hadn't. It just didn't seem right. In fact, it verged on downright rude of the mafia to leave their gruesome stash for him to find, when he was obviously busy with another investigation.

Fortunately, there wasn't much he could tell Major Crimes that they couldn't see for themselves. Cages full of bodies stashed in Arkham Asylum – even Ed agreed it was another mob job. And, unlike the hangings, the mass grave didn't have the thrill of a case that would ever be solved.

The bus pulled up along the street from the March Penguin at 7.05. Ed had positioned himself by the door a block ago, hopping off the moment it opened.

This part of Midtown was infamous for its nightlife. Buses stopped by twenty an hour all the way to midnight. Nightclubs throbbed on the corners behind blacked out windows, tables and chairs made mazes of the sidewalks, a dozen bands competed to be loudest. Everywhere there were people, bouncers, hookers, musicians, tourists, party girls, businessmen, wild young men who howled at Ed as they passed. He kept his briefcase close. With all the fuss with the bodies, he hadn't had a chance to review the coroner's notes, nor transcribe what Harvey and Gordon had told him about their interviews with the victims' families. Maybe he could go through them with Kristen.

Blue neon lit up the March Penguin. It was a nice kind of restaurant, or at least it seemed nice to Ed, who gauged it primarily on its hygiene and that Fish Mooney sometimes dined there, which meant the meat on the menu was probably beef and hadn't come from a mob locker. Once upon a time Ed had thought there were simply some cuts of steak he didn't recognise. Since starting his covert autopsies, he did recognise the cuts, and subsequently had become a fussy diner.

A waiter in a clean white suit greeted him by the counter. "Did you have a booking, sir?"

"Ah."

"Don't sweat it." The waiter waved him in. "It's Tuesday night, we have a few free tables. For one?"

"Two, thank you."

"Right this way."

What was long awaited, far between, and absolutely terrifying? A first date, apparently. Ed grabbed a napkin from a table of three and wiped his sweating palms. The waiter showed him to a small table by the front window, and Ed thanked him profusely and sat. Someone had sprayed fake snow on the window, maybe some holiday thing, or maybe some penguin thing, he wasn't sure.

At 7.12, a new waiter, this one with a dove grey waistcoat, approached Ed with a menu. "Drink, sir?"

"Water, thanks."

The waiter's forehead creased. He was perhaps uncertain whether they had water on the menu. Ed's watch ticked over to 7.13.

"Just turn the tap on," he told the waiter. "You'll find it."

"You don't want something harder?"

Ed shook his head. He smiled at the waiter until the waiter took the hint and backed away.

7.16. The waiter returned with his water. Ed was impressed that he had not only managed to find a source of water (potable?) but also a glass.

"Will you order now, or you want to wait?"

Ed passed an obligatory glance at the menu. Most of the dishes centred around either beef or lamb. Good staples, but tonight Ed didn't feel much like either. Nice cuts of meat in that forgotten wing of Arkham Asylum. Made you wonder.

"I'll wait," he said. The waiter left and Ed immediately cursed his indecision. He could order for Kristen. A dish both outlandish and elegant that would reflect both her sophisticated taste and his prowess of deduction.

7.35. He began to wonder if he hadn't missed her. But surely she would have waited at least five minutes for him. Maybe she'd gotten the wrong restaurant. Maybe she was dead.

Ed recalled seeing a payphone down the street. Maybe he should go call her and make sure she wasn't dead.

"Sir, you ready to order?"

7.53. The waiter was lingering annoyingly close. There were plenty of people in the restaurant, plenty of others he could have irritated. But he kept returning to Ed's table in the corner, and every time Ed saw him, the drum of his fingers on the table grew faster, and the raw salt content in the open wound in his heart grew higher.

"Go away."

The waiter tapped his notepad on the empty seatback. "Come on, man. She's probably running late. Just order, at least you won't go hungry for her."

Ed stood up so fast his chair hit the wall and toppled over. "I'm going to call her. Just. Save the table."

He kept his head low as he hastened past the counter. Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell. He was such an idiot. Of course Kristen had stood him up. She didn't want to date him. She didn't want to be _near_ him. He gulped down the frigid air of the street, feeling the blood rise in his face. He pulled off his glasses and stuffed them in his pocket. How could she?

The phone booth was occupied when he reached it. Ed paced back and forth on the street until the teenager in the booth wrapped up her vacuous conversation. He fed a handful of change into the machine. His fingers knew Kristen's number, although he couldn't remember the last time he'd seen it written down.

Kristen picked up on the seventh ring. She was laughing as she said, "Hello?"

Ed felt such a surge of hatred for her in that moment. A red tide steaming the blood in his arteries, such a meteoric collision of anger he didn't know what to do with it. He loved her – right? He'd thought he did. And there, sure enough, was every stammering thing he'd ever said to her, every newton of desire to be closer to her, cool and sure, sputtering out the flames of his anger.

"Kristen?" He hated the shrillness of his voice. Stupid. He was stupid. He went to hang up the phone.

"Nygma? Edward, is that you?"

Ed held the phone an inch from the receiver. After a heartbeat, he pressed it to his ear. He scooped his glasses from his pocket. But glasses were no comfort to hide behind. "Hi, Kristen. You-"

"Oh my gosh! Edward!" Kristen's gasp was barely audible over the noise in the background. Laughing, calling voices. Ed shoved aside the sickly thought that they were laughing at him. "I was supposed to meet you tonight! I totally forgot. Oh my God, I'm so sorry."

He listened to her go on for a while about how she had his requested files and had gone home to freshen up, only for visitors to arrive. Old friends from out of town. Her old college buddies, wow, what a great night that was, couldn't just turn them away. She hadn't realised how late it was. Hey, they were having a fantastic time, it was so great to catch up, they had even shouted pizza.

Ed thought about asking Kristen if maybe he could come over. She could introduce him to her amazing college buddies. Maybe they could have a good time together.

He rattled the change in his pocket. "Um. I've gotta go. I'm out of coins."

"Oh, sure. I'm sorry, Edward."

He hung up the phone.

Whatever flimsy promise the day had held evaporated as the phone clattered against the receiver. As if it had never been there at all.

He lacked the courage to return to the March Penguin. The warmth of its lights was cold to him now. He wandered away from it, streets of golden lights and rainbow neon, clasping his briefcase against his growling stomach. He felt like such a fool he could have walked straight into the harbour.

He strayed instead into the red lights of a Midtown bar, lulled into its dark grey doors by the croons of the jazz band on stage. Thinking about nothing so much as how foolish he was, he set his briefcase on the bar, avoided the barkeep's eye, and ordered something he'd heard Harvey pine for whenever a homicide was called in near the end of his shift.

"One Old Fashioned coming up," the barkeep chirped.

Ed popped the locks on his briefcase, removing the top few files. He kept his head down, not even bothering to count the other patrons at the bar. The jazz band called a break, and conversation bubbled from the tables around the stage and the booths running parallel to the bar. A short glass with as many ice cubes and cherries as millilitres of fluid was pushed in front of him.

_Nikolas Ozolinsh, 56, male. Next of kin: Caroline Ozolinsh (spouse.) Height: 5'8". Weight: 175lbs. Brunette, balding. Occupation: clinical psychiatrist for ODP Medical._

The file was accompanied by a dozen photocopied photographs of the dead man. Of most interest was the face. Those thick black sutures binding the mouth shut. Ensuring silence into death.

The next file belonged to Jarod Augustine, the safety inspector. Survived by his brother, Lex. Augustine worked for Big Red Construction Solutions. Big Red was a subsidiary of Maroon Building, owned by Maroni. Out of the first five deceased, Augustine was the only one with obvious ties to the mob.

Something about the red and black decor began to gnaw at Ed's consciousness. Here he was in a club in Midtown, an upmarket place he'd never been before. A woman's voice caught his ear.

"-dreadful business, but it had to be done. Consider it Maroni's warning we won't put up with his shit."

Ed grabbed his cocktail glass. He drained it whole. It burned the whole way down and he blinked back tears, his nose and stomach seconds from revolt. He slapped the glass on the bar. Reflections on a bead of condensation depicted an unmistakable miniature of the woman behind him. Fish Mooney. He'd wandered right into the lioness's den.

Quickly, shoving his appropriated files back into his briefcase, Ed found his little black voice recorder. He kept his back to Fish's booth, which must have been just feet away for him to hear her so clearly. One could only hope the recorder heard her as well.

Kristen Kringle had been a failure. An utter disaster.

But the investigation would go ahead.

* * *

_**A/N:**__ Oh no, poor Ed. That darn Kristen. We can blame her for all the bad stuff that's about to happen._

_Review, because I'd love to hear what you're thinking about. I bet it's super interesting and fun._


	5. Better Dead

_**A/N:**__ I have no excuse for my absence. Truancy! Truancy! Dragged into the street and shot by those I trusted most! Enjoy the story!_

* * *

Chapter 5: Better Dead

First thing the next day Ed was back at the morgue, his briefcase open on an empty gurney while he bent over the body on the shelf, white clouds of vapour rising with his breath.

The tag around the toe was for one Karl Waterman, 63, identified informally by the licence in his wallet and formally by his wife. Karl was a solid guy, average height, a festering, bone-deep wound around his left ankle, his dark skin turned ashy in the onset of decay. Even sitting in a freezer overnight hadn't completely suppressed the sweet stench of rot. Ed estimated Karl had been dead three days before he was found hanging from Arkham Asylum.

Which was weird, really. As Gordon had pointed out on scene, the view of the body was obstructed from anyone outside Arkham Island. But there were security patrols all over the place – even if a complete tour of the island was made only two or three times a day, no patrol with functioning eyes would have missed the corpses hanging from the intensive treatment ward. Perhaps in the dark they would, expecting fresh bodies to be hung from the clock tower, and their backs turned to the ward.

"The first patrol in the morning made the find," Ed muttered to Karl as he pried open the incision in the dead man's abdomen. No maggots squirmed away from his fingers, and he saw no dead grubs in the cavity. "The bodies were hung overnight, but kept elsewhere for up to 48 hours after death. Somewhere away from flies."

He left the abdomen, passing only a precursory glance at the stomach. He'd flicked through the coroner's report on his way into the morgue. Karl Waterman had gone missing a week ago. According to his wife, he'd left for work in the morning and never come home. He was a builder, and at first Ed thought that boded well for an examination of his stomach contents – a little al fresco dining with Ms Mooney, perhaps? But no. Karl was the senior site manager for Moreau Private Builders, a company which dealt solely in homes and had no mafia ties beyond a monthly protection racket to Falcone.

It seemed unlikely then that Karl Waterman's death was owed to his company's mob affiliations. He could have had a gambling debt, a friendship or an information broking deal with any one of the dons or their pawns ... but Ed didn't think that was anything he'd discover in Karl's stomach.

He would have looked anyway, if he'd had the time for a full autopsy. Alas, the medical examiner was due in any moment.

Karl's coroner had severed the sutures binding his lips shut. Snip, snip, snip. Ed tugged the bottom jaw down and slid his fingers into the dry mouth. His penlight blanched the dark tissue of the tongue and cheeks. The tongue was attached, and Ed frowned at it. He cast a sharp glance over the little tears in the upper and lower lips. Karl had been alive when his mouth was sewn up, and his tongue attached. Ed searched for a scalpel. A quick check of the vocal chords should indicate whether or not Karl had been capable or not of speaking before his mouth was sewn closed.

He heard footsteps in the hall. It was time to pack this up. Ed strode swiftly to Karl's feet and shoved the shelf back into the freezer, hearing it lock into place with a soft _click_.

The morgue door swung open with Ed halfway to his briefcase. He grabbed it and snapped it shut as he strode for the door. Dark-haired and hard-mouthed, the medical examiner glowered at him from the doorway.

"What are you doing in here, Nygma?"

Stagg made no attempt to move from the door. Ed stepped left, still moving forward. The examiner mirrored his motion and Ed slipped around him into the hall.

"I'm adding value to your autopsy," he muttered, spurring away before the examiner could stop him.

His footsteps slowed the moment he left the morgue. It was a short walk to the station, and Ed knew Kristen would be by his desk sometime that morning with the files. He didn't want to see her. Worse, he didn't want her to see him. He was so _stupid_. How could he let himself be set up like that?

He pushed open the double doors to the station with the singular goal of not seeing anyone. "I should quit," head down he marched straight past the front desk and into the throng of officers. "Go somewhere people appreciate me."

Voices chittered all around him, the everyday disorder of the morning shift change. Ed watched his shoes on the stairs. Just a little further and he'd be safe in his office.

"There he is! Hey, Ed." Harvey Bullock's scuffed boots appeared on the top step. Ed went to duck around him and bumped into a secretary rushing down the stairs. She dropped her stack of photocopying, a half ream of paper billowing down the crowded stairwell.

"Watch it, will ya?" she snapped.

"Sorry-"

Ed yelped as Harvey yanked him off the stairwell. "Don't be. I need you more than she does. You know we went to see Fish?"

"Actually –"

"Just shut up and listen." Harvey steered Ed into a huddle by the desk, where Gordon waited, coffee in hand. Gordon nodded. Harvey scowled at Ed from the deep shadows of his hat. "Turns out Fish wasn't real happy to see us. See, she heard about the Stitcher, but she's way more worried about that meat locker you dug up. At a guess, I'd say she knew about the corpses in the cages and now she's real pissed off this Stitcher guy's gone blown her secret."

The reminder of the meat locker verged on a physical impact. Ed didn't mind the dead, no siree, didn't bother him. The dead were kinda nice all things considered. Didn't matter you pulled a corpse out of the harbour or scraped it off the front of a truck, it wouldn't tell you to shut up. You could talk for as long as you wanted to a corpse. What he'd seen yesterday though, bodies all hacked up into their component limbs like joints of meat and then stuffed in cages, black blooms of decay and brown blood and slipped organs squished in everywhere, that wasn't peaceful. That was noisy. A wall of static. Noisy, restless cages of human meat.

Nausea rose through Ed. Harvey was talking but it sounded like a stuttering pulse in his ear.

Maybe the rapidity with which he blanched alerted Gordon. The detective reached over and tapped Harvey's arm. "Shush. You all right, Ed?"

Mooney was responsible for the meat locker. Or at least she knew about it. She'd been four foot away from Ed for an hour last night. He could still taste her perfume. The way she'd been speaking – sending a message to Maroni that she wasn't a pushover. She'd killed – she'd ordered them killed – all those people? Arms and legs and missing heads?

"It's fine," he said to Gordon, though by the way Gordon frowned, this answer was no longer relevant. He supposed this made his effort to record Fish's conversation last night null. The mob locker case would never see court. "I thought Miss Mooney was – but, obviously."

As he let his gaze roam the chaos on the ground floor, just for some distraction, Kristen's blonde head and pretty laugh bubbled up from the front desk. Another woman held her arm. One of the CSIs, Sally Sue. He was too far away to tell what they were saying, but both were smiling. His heartbeat faltered as Kristen lifted her gaze to the balcony. Not sure if she had seen him, he raised a hand in automatic greeting. Sally Sue nodded towards the balcony, and both women burst out laughing. The sound carried clear across the station. Even when their backs turned to him his ears stayed ringing with the sound.

"He's lost it," Harvey told Gordon. He poked Ed's side with a pen, with no response. "Look at him. Dopey. Staring into space. Too many damn riddles wrecked his brain."

"Maybe he's not well."

"No way, man. This is space cadet, even for Ed. Hey! Get it together, will ya? You gotta help us solve this case!"

Ed finally shook himself from his trance. He stared down at Harvey, blinking furiously behind his glasses. "Wh – what did you say?"

Harvey pushed a tape cassette into his hands. "I said I got you a present. No need to thank me. That's eighty minutes of boring interviews. I got four more where that came from. Listen to 'em all and tell us what we're missing."

* * *

Harvey was right about one thing – the interviews held little of interest to a forensic scientist. Most of what they did contain was about the living. Joon Myeong Song was an anaesthetist with Gotham General Hospital and a decorated philanthropist. He'd sponsored a medical van catering to Gotham's mentally ill homeless population. Peony Norman, a typist, lived by herself and kept a number of cats. Her neighbour described Peony as a quiet but generous-hearted spirit who never entertained visitors. Kym Katee was a brilliant psychiatrist despite her chronic depression. She loved taking photographs of laughing children. And so on and so on.

What they _didn't_ fill in were the gaps in the coroner's reports. The gaps in their lives. Namely, what they had been doing ten years ago, before the closure of Arkham Asylum.

At the end of several hours, Ed was as unhappy as he had been upon waking that morning in his desolate apartment, with the additional disadvantages of being bored and confused as to why he cared that these people had died.

He didn't care, of course. Not about the people on the interview tapes, nor about the victims, and not even about those unidentified lumps of meat sitting in ice in the morgue down the street. People died, and that was sad, but what was really fascinating was how they did it.

Seven seemingly unrelated people had been abducted, beaten, had their mouths sewn shut, hung upside-down from the roof of a mental institution and left to exsanguinate in company of crows and flies. Now that was a riddle. That there would be more victims seemed inevitable. The killer was posing a question. Until it had been answered, he would keep asking.

Sometime after lunch, Ed took his briefcase with his notebook, tapes and growing collection of misappropriated reports, signed off at the front desk, and caught a bus to Midtown. The only notice he left of his departure was a note tacked to Gordon's keyboard. _Wievgl xli Excpyq. _Simple stuff, but Ed didn't want to take the chance of Gordon not being able to decipher it if something went wrong.

The 817 dropped him down the street from the March Penguin. Tables and chairs still littered the streets, but now the sidewalk was quiet, the homeless snoozing in sunlit doorways, last night's prostitutes replaced with a couple of young businesswomen sharing a smoke on the corner. Ed hurried past the March Penguin and the phone booth, hitting right at the corner on route to the harbour. A block and a half later he slowed.

Mooney's Club was as subdued as any on the street, looking like a big cat curled up in the sun. A closed sign hung inside the door. Ed tried the handle anyway, found it locked, and moved quickly away from the glass facade to the tidy alleyway running alongside the club.

Twenty yards along the alley opened into a little patio area, two tables cloaked with red parasols, divided from the alley by a bamboo screen. No one was around. There were two doors; a double glass giving access to the patio, another further along the alleyway by a couple of bins. Ed stood on the patio, unable to see past the glare on the glass. His pulse thudded like a pen tapping his shoulder, urging him to please turn around.

He tried the glass doors. They were locked.

Chewing his lip now, Ed eased back between the tables. His briefcase caught a chair and scraped it over the concrete. He whipped into the alleyway proper. The third door, then. Something here had to be open. He'd knock all afternoon otherwise. The door swung open as he made for it and four big men spilled into the alley.

"Look at thisss," one said to another as they bloomed the width of the alleyway. Ed's instinct to turn and run was subverted by his scientist's fascination with the horror befalling him. One of the men was dragging a lead pipe over the concrete as he walked. _Sccccccccrape. _ "We got us a visitor."

The thugs, bouncers, whoever they were, flowed around Ed, who twisted to follow them only to find himself circled. He'd had been mugged a few times, but this reminded him more of high school, bullies butting their shoulders against him, knocking him down for fun rather than profit. In both cases the trick was to stay calm. Ed was almost managing to lie to himself that he was calm, when the thug behind him cracked the pipe into his knee and Ed fell to the ground with a shout.

His briefcase was kicked away, a more visceral pain than being struck with the pipe. A blond-headed thug leant over him, and Ed stared into a face like a block of broken concrete, a couple of shiny spiders for eyes. The thug's thick cologne could not obfuscate his underlying stench of sweat.

"Saw you here last night, rat. Whaddaya want? You want to get dead? Why the fuck'd you come here?"

Ed opened his mouth and the Latino next to Blondie whacked the pipe against the wall. He missed Ed's head by a good couple of inches, but if he was going for intimidation then he had it. Ed pawed for his GCPD badge inside his jacket. Blondie stooped and grabbed his jaw, and the badge tumbled from Ed's fingers and skittered across the alleyway.

Holding Ed by the jaw, Blondie spat, "You going for a gun, kid? Huh? You think that's gonna fly?"

He filled the world. An unseen thug behind him called, "Mickey, look. The kid's with the GCPD."

"This nerd?"

Two of the thugs had Ed's briefcase open on the concrete, one flicking through carefully labelled reports while the others examined the cassettes and recorder. Ed wasn't dumb enough to bring last night's recording with him, but even without it there was enough information in the briefcase to get him killed ten times over.

The thug with the reports shrugged. "Either that or he's a ballsy thief. Ms Mooney prob'ly wants to see him either way."

Mickey slapped Ed against the wall, a reminder for Ed not to run. He crouched with the others by the briefcase. The Latino with the lead pipe smiled down at Ed, and there was nothing, nothing at all behind the thug's dark eyes. He lifted a finger to his lips. Ed frowned. The thug brought the pipe up. His teeth gleamed behind spit-flecked lips. Ed threw himself sideways as the pipe cracked against the wall, brick chips flying outwards, cried as his swelling knee hit the concrete. Shouts roared through the alleyway. Ed scrambled to his feet, pushing past the thugs as they grabbed for him. For just a second he thought he might make the street. His knee collapsed and flung him to the ground.

His breath burst from his lungs. Outlines blurred as his glasses fell askew. A moment passed in numbness, then he gasped for breath and pain socked his chest like a gunshot.

Mickey's blond blur appeared overhead. His fellow thugs spread out around him. Ed had the nasty idea that all of them were smiling.

Mickey peeled Ed from the concrete. He straightened Ed's glasses, slapped him on the back, and laughed as Ed staggered into another thug. To Ed's horror it was the Latino, who wrapped an arm around his shoulders and tapped him on the chest with the pipe that had busted his knee, as if it were all some big joke.

"You think I'm funny," he said. "Wait til you meet Ms Mooney."

* * *

_**A/N:**__ I'm going to upload a few chapters this week, since I have been so tardy. So please look out for that. Australian Gotham fans, I don't know if we will ever see another episode here. We'll have to wait for the DVD. T-T_

_Has anyone got the answer to Ed's bit of code? ;D I'll tell you next chapter if you don't get it. As a clue ... the letter R is key to solving it._

_Also thank you so much to everyone for your reviews. I have been a haphazard uploader of late, but the story is done so it will continue. Love you all, you are all amazing, see you tomorrow for chapter 6 and Ed's meeting with Fish. OMG will they kiss? I hope ... not? _


	6. Can't Keep Quiet

_**A/N:**__ Bon appetit!_

* * *

Chapter 6: Can't Keep Quiet

"Curious."

Fish Mooney dominated the table, her silver nails turning through the pages of Ed's misappropriated reports. Her teeth were sharp behind soft red lips, her golden eyes sharper. The blockheaded Mickey and the massively broad-shouldered Latino thug who Fish called Alvaro stood either side of her, as if Ed needed more reason to be intimidated.

He sat rigid, chair jammed into the corner by the stage, one leg under the chair, the other held straight as his knee swelled past bending. Beyond Fish he had a view over the tables and the glass doors giving onto the patio, a curtain obscuring his view of the bar and the exit onto the street. Two of Fish's men stood guard by the exits. The other tables were empty, light jazz played over the sound system, and Ed knew if he screamed there wasn't anyone in a two block radius who would call the police.

What would Jim Gordon do in this situation? Being beaten up in an alleyway and hauled in front of mob bosses was Gordon's thing. But Ed's suit was dishevelled, his glasses were scratched, he was sore all over, and he did not feel like Jim Gordon.

Needing something, he folded his tie under his sweater. The moment his fingers touched his tie Mickey reached out and slammed him into the table, pushing papers in a cloud to the floor. Ed tried to distance himself from the table top, but Mickey's hand pressed down hard on his neck, and Ed realised he would be forced to conduct the meeting from this absurd position.

Fish closed the final report, relaxed back in her seat, and gazed at Ed like a knife at a twitching jugular. Her silver clawed hand turned Ed's GCPD badge upside-down on the table. Her voice was a purr, her eyes hooded and calm. "Another martyr in the lion's den. Didn't Harvey give you the message? I haven't done a thing."

Ed's heart drummed against the table's edge. Pride smarting at how ridiculous she had made him, he stuttered, "I – I heard what you told them. Seems like a web spun from a silver tongue to me."

A shadow fell over Fish. "Are you calling me a liar?"

"What do a safety inspector, a nurse and a psychiatrist all have in common?"

She bristled. "I don't have time for this. Mickey. Alvaro. Show the boy out."

Big hands dragged him off the table. Ed didn't fight them. His attention was for Fish and Fish alone. He blurted in desperation, "Why sew the mouths shut?"

Max hauled Ed onto the floor. Fish twisted to follow. "Wait!"

She uncoiled like a streak of sunlight on brass, gold dress shimmering, silver claws reaching for Ed as he fought himself not to fight the thugs holding him in place. He recoiled as Fish's nails grazed his jaw, and then his neck, wrapping around the back of his head and forcing him down, down, until she and he were eye to eye, and further still, his left knee on the floor, Fish staring dispassionately into his face, Ed shivering in pain as his right leg was forced to bend.

"Brave, darling. But stupid," she purred in his ear, wisps of her breath sending shivers down his spine. She smelled like sex. She smelled like the meat locker. "You were the one who put Harvey onto me. You should have known to steer well clear."

"How-"

She pressed a finger to his lips. "Shush."

For the longest time now, Ed had dreamt of wooing Kristen Kringle with some amazing logical deduction or genius filing system. He dreamt of her running into his arms, throwing herself against him, and the scent of her, and the warmth and the softness of her, and her love, or – or her need, or her want, he didn't know what but he knew there must be something, her desire for him, something – to push back against every wretched night, every day he had spent alone. He wanted her to conquer that. But now Fish's lips pressed full and sweet against his, and he didn't know why she wanted him, but it was someone in this city who wanted him, for whom he was not a bother, and so he kissed her, teeth on tongue and tongue on lips, his mind full of her, needing her, dizzy when she let him go.

"Oh," Fish leant back with charcoal eyes, tongue flicking the taste of Ed from her lips. "I see now. You need someone to listen to you. Must be desperate for you to come here to me."

A hollow pressure forced itself inside Ed's chest. Needed – he needed – no. What he needed was just to be needed.

"Help me solve this case," he begged Fish, softly. "Whoever killed those people had something to say. We'll never catch them until we hear it."

Fish smiled like a lioness, standing up away from him. "Tell me, what do I have to gain from working with the GCPD?"

Her thugs took their cue to let Ed stand. They had to help him. Pain engulfed his right side. He took the few seconds' recovery time they allowed him fighting the urge to vomit. That he could put weight on his leg was some comfort; he could dismiss the possibility of a fractured or dislocated patella. But he wouldn't be running. He said to Fish in the vaguest of minds,

"I'll get to that. I suspect I know what a safety inspector, a nurse and a psychiatrist have in common. I can solve who's behind these hangings. But I can't verify it without access to the Asylum."

"Surely you have access to the crime scene."

Ed shook his head. "It's help I need, not access. The Asylum is huge. It's part abandoned wreck, part construction site, and the CSIs have to scour every bit of it for traces of the Stitcher. They can't spare the manpower to change their search on the whim of a technician. I need help to find the proof. Your help."

Fish draped herself in her seat. She waved a hand at Mickey. "Fetch us a drink, sweetie." Mickey bowed away and Fish's gaze settled on Ed. "Tell me, darling, why would I help you? I'm not in any danger of being harassed by your little fellows at the precinct. Harvey already knows I had nothing to do with the hangings."

A jumble of bodies in cages. Ed's gaze hardened. "And everything to do with the meat locker."

Fish's mouth twisted. "Don't you accuse me, child."

He flinched away from her. "I'm not!"

A backwards pace carried him into Alvaro. In an instant Fish was on her feet, a silver steak knife from the table balanced between her long fingers. Her eyes flitted over his face, on impulse she struck for his throat. Ed jerked aside, the knife tearing his jaw and ear. He went to run and Alvaro grabbed him by the arm and propelled him back towards Fish.

Her silver claws bunched his jacket. Fish's eyes were hypnotic on Ed's, the knife grazed his stomach. She stood so close her breath mingled with his as the blood slide slowly down his neck. A car horn sounded a million miles away on the street, half-drowned under the sax solo playing on the speakers. Ed had been afraid for his life before; now he realised he was terrified. Watching his expression change, Fish's lips curved into a smile.

"You're not as clever as you think, to come in here alone. Arkham Asylum isn't the only meat locker in Gotham. Are you that keen to see the inside of another?"

Ed jerked backwards. Alvaro flung him to the floor. The knife followed his throat, Fish driving it down atop of him. He threw out a hand, the blading biting into his wrist, dragging a hot line to his elbow but deflecting the knife enough that it bit into the floorboards rather than his throat.

Fish slapped him, straddled his chest and wriggled up until her knees in his armpits forced his arms over his head. He kicked at her, realised he couldn't reach her. Grabbed for her wrists, and Fish caught them and pinned them to the floor. By sheer luck of gender he was stronger than her, but with his arms bent and hers straight pinning him down, he wasn't strong enough to throw her off.

She leant low over him, white teeth behind red lips, and Ed knew this woman would tear out his throat with her teeth.

He ripped on hand from under hers, blood streaming down his torn arm. Fish snatched for it and he jammed it along his side, striking her knee with his elbow, bucking his full force up and to the left as he did. She didn't quite fly off him, but she did rise enough that with a bit of flailing Ed was able to twist and pull himself from under her.

"I'm not trying to frame you!" he cried, as Mickey and Alvaro descended on him, yanking his arms hard behind his back. His right leg had been about to drop from under him anyway. Fish stood swaying, and plucked the knife from the floor. "A- anyone could have dumped those corpses. Anyone you want! Sal – Salvatore Maroni, even!"

Squatted over him, Fish waved the knife in Ed's eye. "That son of a bitch? Start talking. You have ten seconds before I cut out your eyes and feed them to you."

Nothing remained but the truth. Pathetic as it was.

"It's Gordon," he said. He looked past the knife, searching Fish's face for something he knew he would find there. Only when he found it did his pride simmer enough to let him speak. "Harvey too. They're always playing hero. But they're dumb. They'd be useless without forensics – without me. But they tell me to shut up," a pang of guilt at Gordon's betrayal here, "at least, Harvey does. All I want is, you know, a little recognition. For once, I want to be the one everybody needs."

Fish smirked in delight. "You are quite the attention whore. So what's the deal? You frame Moroni for the meat locker, and I give you the manpower to search the Asylum for your, ah, heroic evidence?"

"Maroni's corrupt anyway. Right? Worse than you." Ed felt the knife bite into the flesh over his ribs, and grinned at Fish in a foreshadow of rigor mortis. "But you've got it. That's all I want. It's a win-win."

Fish slid the knife from under Ed's skin. She sucked the blood from the blade. "You still taste sweet." And she tossed her head back, and laughed, and laughed. "But we'll fix that."

It wasn't until Ed had stumbled through the door of his shitty Downtown apartment and flopped on the bed that he seriously started to question the wisdom of his decision.

He rolled onto his back, gazing at the cracked and sagging ceiling, and wondered why he didn't move someplace new. He could afford better. But the books on the shelves were his, beloved copies of Victor Stegner and Martin Gardner, Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, and the place wasn't totally devoid of comfort. There were gadgets he'd built and services he'd hacked – free phone service and cable TV – not that he watched much TV. When the box was on, Ed was inevitably compelled to cop shows. The cops inevitably ignored the forensics (or excluded them entirely!) and Ed was dumped right back into his own, overlooked life.

_All I want is, you know, a little recognition._ How pathetic could he get?

He let his aching bones rest a while, then rolled sorely from the bed and limped down the hall. He needed to shower and dress his cuts, but that could wait another few minutes. His briefcase sat on the kitchen bench next to his computer, the most modern thing Ed owned. He switched it on and left it to boot while he checked the answering machine. No messages. Nothing substantial to eat in the fridge. He stopped for a moment, listening to his neighbours laughing and arguing through the walls. Living here was like permanently living with a broken leg. Everyone else went out and had fun while you sat and rotted.

Ed returned to his briefcase, pulling everything from it and arranging it on the bench. Fish's thugs had made a mess of things, but at least his papers and tapes had been returned.

"There you are," he dug out the medical examiner's post-mortem report for Peony Norman. Moving to the computer, he opened a word document and typed in the post-mortem fields. A few of these, fabricated for the meat locker victims and composed in the examiner's style, inserted amongst the other meat locker reports, might be all he needed to throw the GCPD onto Moroni's trail.

It would be interesting, really, to see just how easy it would be.

Even just for a day. They would listen.

* * *

_**A/N:**__ I did a lot of extra work on this chapter, pretty much rewriting it. Ed's conversation with Fish is unusual in that there is a lot of action but little movement. It seemed to last forever! I hope with the revision it reads better. And also that there aren't too many typos. _ Tell me if you see one and I'll nuke it!_

_Fish is sexy, sexy, sexy. Everything she does is sexy. Sexy walking, sexy threatening, sexy getting out of a taxi. She's crazy sexy! If she kissed me, I'd go up in smoke._

_Thank you again for your reviews. You're all amazing, and you give me the power to get through the editing each ... day ... I don't edit every day, but every day I DO edit, it's because of you guys. ;)_

_By the way we're halfway through! Wild! _


	7. Easy

_**A/N:**__ Good evening Gothamites. Get ready to be blown away._

* * *

Chapter 7: Easy

Forging post mortems was not easy in the slightest.

The devil was in the details. For the reports to survive scrutiny, Ed had to mimic the medical examiner's prose perfectly. That part was simple; Ed had spent four years with the GCPD reading the medical examiner's base and obvious prose, and in doing so had read every possible combination of words the coroner was capable of coming up with. Ed didn't so much write the reports as remember them.

Still, Ed felt uneasy. He held the printed pages in hand, scanning them over and over, waiting for the accusation even though he was alone in his apartment.

Lying – that's what he was doing. He was lying to Captain Essen and Major Crimes and everybody in the GCPD. It didn't matter that he'd manufactured the forged reports using his own cheap printer, a device so unlike the Gotham morgue printer that the differences in type sets and ink quality should have been immediately obvious to everyone. He knew what they were like. Nobody would notice. Noticing was Ed's job. If he didn't do it, well, there was an uncomfortable chance that his lies would be believed.

"I'm not a liar."

He held the papers uncomfortably. Here's a riddle for ya, Ed, thought the more awful part of his mind, the part that was most like his father. If you plant those papers, what's the difference between you and a liar?

Ed stared silently at the refrigerator. He dumped the papers in the bin and retook his seat at the computer. A riddle, huh?

Let no one say he didn't warn them.

* * *

He usually found the Gotham City Police headquarters calming. But the next morning, overslept, aching all over and late for perhaps the second time in his professional career, Ed walked into the storming vortex seas of justice versus bureaucracy and had to fight the urge to walk out.

Harvey Bullock was embroiled in the morning fight for doughnuts. Today he had a foam coffee cup in one hand, no lid, coffee splashing down his wrist as he gesticulated violently at Officer Moles, who had taken Harvey's hat. Worse, Moles was busy eating the doughnut Harvey had stashed under his hat for secure transport, which meant that Moles (and now everybody else in the GCPD) knew where Harvey kept his doughnuts.

Ed checked in at the desk, deaf to the cry of indignation as he trod on a secretary's foot. The fight for doughnuts concluded with Harvey splashing the last of his coffee on Officer Moles and stealing half a jam bun from a giggling spectator, who chased Harvey the whole way across the station before losing him on the stairs.

"Eat that, bitches!" Harvey cawed, backing up traffic all up and down the staircase. He swallowed the jam bun with a smack of lips that echoed around the station.

Ed felt a flush of admiration for the man. If you were going to be a villain, there were far worse role models than Harvey.

"Morning, Edward."

Kristen Kringle bobbed into view and all of Ed's professional objectivism evaporated. The tides of people pushing around him had pushed him away from the front desk, and now Kristen finished signing in and joined him on the floor.

She smiled. He stared.

Red touched her cheeks. "I called out to you by the morgue earlier. I guess you didn't hear me."

_Witness_, thought Ed. Realising he had not stopped staring at her, and that the increasing colouration of her face meant this was making her uncomfortable, he stammered, "I – I guess not. How are you today, Miss Kringle?"

Kristen laughed in a way Ed would have taken for genuine had she not then tossed her head like a fitful horse. "I'm fine, Edward. Hey. About the other night. I'm so sorry."

He considered telling her that it hadn't bothered him. He hadn't lain awake all night being tortured by his own foolishness. Not this forensic scientist. Nope.

The words didn't want to happen. He opened his mouth and shut it again and gawked at her on the verge of tears.

"Please don't cry," Kristen blurted. She returned the curious stares of the officers around them with a hot glare. "I'm sorry, okay? Let's book another time. What are you doing tonight?"

Ed checked behind him. He had a clear path to the stairs and every mind to make a break for it, though his leg would slow him down and he doubted he could outpace Kristen. "I don't want to bother you."

"You won't be." Kristen summoned all her courage in a smile. Ed knew she was lying, that she felt sorry for him or guilty for herself, name like that she probably had some Christian guilt complex, and she had hurt him, and he was not pathetic enough to be the sacrificial lamb on the altar of her Christian guilt. He _wasn't._

"Tonight," he said, his guts like knotted bedsheets inside him, "where?"

Kristen's face softened into something like an actual smile. "You'll go?"

He nodded.

"How about Cafe Sass, 7 o' clock? I go there sometimes with friends. It's not the most upscale place, but it's nice."

"I know it." Ed gazed at Kristen, helplessly, hopelessly. How did she do this to him? "See you there."

* * *

By lunchtime he was looking forward to it. Forget asking Kristen on a date – she had asked him!

While he usually ate at his desk, today Ed made a point of taking his oat muffin and juice box and limping down to the break room. Ten minutes into the stint Crispen Allen and Renee Montoya burst in shouting about their latest lead in the meat locker case.

"Damn Major Crimes creeps," muttered the officer seated beside Ed at the table. "Think they're such goddamn heroes."

The officer scooped up his sandwich crusts and walked out. Detective Montoya dropped into his seat. "I'm telling you, it doesn't mean anything. This was Fish's doing, cut and clear."

Allen took a seat across the table, dumping a small stack of papers beside his burrito. A little thrill ran through Ed. He recognised the type set marks on the upmost sheet. Allen had the morgue reports. _His_ morgue reports.

"You tell me this doesn't mean anything." Allen peeled the top report from the pile, taking a savage bite of his burrito before he read, "_First incision shoulder – hip. Digging instrument damage, igneous topsoil. _Sound like Fish to you?"

Oh boy. They'd read out the clue, just like that. Ed eyed the door. Was it too obvious? It was really obvious. He crumpled his juice box and prepared to escape.

Montoya sipped her coffee. "It sounds like Moroni to me," she confessed, and Ed almost choked. "Digging instruments – Maroni's all over construction. I can't imagine Fish having anyone cut up with a shovel."

"Or a mattock," Ed suggested. Montoya and Allen shot him a glance, which he shrugged off with apparent nonchalance. "Or even a hoe or a pickaxe. You need a big, heavy instrument to hack off a leg."

The detectives considered this. Allen rested his elbow on the report. "You know what really gets me about this? Yesterday the examiner told us he thought the bodies were cut up with an automated guillotine, maybe something out of Fish's factories. Today he gives us this. Screw you guys, it was a shovel. Or a hoe." He glanced at Ed. "I don't even know what a mattock looks like."

"It's kind of a guillotine," Ed told him, "except on the end of a stick, like a rake or a scythe. They're used for breaking up tough soil."

"Or bodies," Montoya added darkly. She looked at Allen, and sighed. "I guess we've gotta take the lead. Pity, though. At least we stood a fart's chance in hell of a conviction with Fish. With Maroni, all this will do is make the Mountain higher."

The Mountain was the piles evidence implicating Gotham's mafia dons, but which never saw court. Maybe it would, one day, when the city's crime lords and its politicians didn't share the same name.

Allen scowled. "Either way, looks like we'll need a soil map and a week of bagging dirt."

"Maybe I can help you," said Ed, as if he intended to do just that. "Or at least tell you where to start. Gotham's mainly built on limestone, hence the extensive cave networks, but there is a little natural granite around the southern peninsula, and we do import it extensively for construction. Miss Kringle could give you the names of the companies that import it. However, I might suggest you start by investigating construction sites on the peninsula. Use of the mattock implies the granite is native in the soil."

This earned him matching frowns. "What do we care about granite?" Allen said.

"It's an igneous rock." Ed blinked. Maybe the clue wasn't as obvious as he thought. Or, more likely, his audience weren't that intelligent. "Limestone is sedimentary. Whoever cut up those bodies wasn't just anywhere on Gotham."

Montoya shot up from the table, Allen hot on her heels.

The pang of guilt Ed felt was nothing compared to his elation.

* * *

He hit home at half past five, humming to dispel the emptiness of the apartment. No one had asked him about the scratches on his glasses, though Jim Gordon had asked if he was feeling all right when Ed's aching knee and ribs made him cling to the stair rail for support.

But that was okay. Ed wasn't worried about a couple of superficial knife wounds and the mild bruising on his ribs. He took a shower, good and hot, just what he needed. Maybe he'd bring Kristen back here tonight. Or even better, they'd go to her place. It could be too soon for that, though. She was probably a good Christian girl. Ed might have to wait until they were married.

The thought of marrying Kristen sent a blush from his neck to his ears. Towelled off, naked in the crowded bathroom, Ed glanced at himself in the mirror. It was just a small thing glued above the vanity, low enough that he had to stoop to catch his own eye. He raked a hand through his damp hair. He'd been told he was cute before. Cute, eh? Pity he wasn't ripped. He was pretty sure Kristen would prefer ripped to cute.

His watch on the sink read 6 o' clock. Ed had an hour to get to Cafe Sass. An hour was ample time to get dressed and catch a bus to the riverfront, but Ed doubted he could consolidate a six-week body building program and still make the date.

"Well then," he told his suit for the evening, "I'll just have to wow her with my intellect."

It was political, he thought, dressing quickly. Now he had the date with Kristen, and was reasonably confident that she would show (she would, wouldn't she?), his primary goal became to score a follow-up date. The actual scoring could wait, unless Ed could somehow sway her with his sexual prowess. Ed paused buttoning his shirt, caught his eye in the foggy mirror, and laughed.

No. What he had to do, beyond all else, if there was to be any hope at all for marriage, was to convince Kristen he was worth a second date.

Easy, right?

* * *

The cafe's rosy lighting glimmered in Kristen's eyes as she laughed.

"My God, Edward, that's hilarious. I never knew the forensics were such a funny lot."

Ed studied her for a moment. Her chin rested on her slender hand, the lines of her mouth were relaxed and happy, her eyes dark and lively. She had her hair pulled back in a bun, and a black and white dress that flattered her athletic figure. Everything about her was relaxed, from the noisy way she sipped her wine to the long exposure of her throat when she tipped her head back and laughed.

The cafe beyond Kristen may as well not have existed at all. Ed hadn't tasted a bite of his dinner, and the most he knew about the wine was that it was red. More than anything, he knew he loved Kristen.

She watched Ed take a gulp of wine. Her mouth curved into a smile. The wine had replaced her lipstick in staining her lips red. "Say, let's not talk about work any more. What do you do for fun?"

"Oh, I work." Ed took in Kristen's slight frown, and amended, "Also puzzles. You know, maths equations and riddles, video games. Sometimes I build kit models."

Kristen nodded, but it was clear this was not the answer she had expected. "You don't go out much? No social clubs?"

"I, you know. No."

"I guess it's pretty intense at the station. I don't blame you for wanting to get away from people for a while."

"Yeah."

Ed didn't mention that his solitude was more by design than choice.

"Oh hey," he said, as Kristen launched into a story about her college buddies, "I did go out recently. Have you been to Mooney's Club?"

Kristen's eyebrows shot towards her hairline. "Fish Mooney's place? You're kidding. With friends?"

No, not with friends. Jim Gordon was the closest thing Ed had to a friend, and even Ed could sense the one-sidedness of that relationship. "No, no. Just to have a drink. The night you stood me up."

It was perhaps the wrong thing to say. Kristen's face fell. "Oh."

"I did go back," Ed added, with a smile he didn't feel like. Come on, man, where was that laughing, happy girl of minutes ago? He wanted her back. "Um. Funny story, actually. I met Miss Mooney."

Kristen slapped the table, life leaping back into her eyes. "Get out! You met Fish Mooney?"

Encouraged, Ed said, "Uh huh. She um, asked me to sit at her table, as a matter of fact."

"No way."

"Yep."

"Why?" Kristen toyed with a smile, teasing Ed beyond his rational concerns. "There's gotta be a story behind this. Is that why you're limping? Was it for work?"

"Not officially." Ed hesitated. So what if he told Kristen? What was the worst that could happen? Everyone in the GCPD knew that the meat locker case would never amount to anything, even if Fish was implicated. Hey, this might even be the intellectual tour de force he needed to win that second date.

So he told her. Everything. How he was on the verge of figuring out the Stitcher's identity. His discovery of the meat locker, and Fish's obvious involvement. How he had cut a deal with Fish – her security to help him search the Asylum in exchange for him framing Maroni.

It was somewhere near the end of this ten minute speech that Ed noticed Kristen's initially wrapt expression had become one of abject horror. He stumbled to a stop midway through describing how he had forged the post mortem reports, and how funny it was that Kristen had seen him leaving the morgue that morning having completed the plant.

Ed ran a tongue over his lip. He could see himself reflected in the horrified black pools of Kristen's dilated pupils. "What's wrong?"

"Wrong?" The word left her mouth in a little cough of disbelief. Kristen looked at the wall, and back at Ed. "What's _wrong_, Edward? What's wrong with _you?_ How could you do something like that?"

"I-"

"You what? You think this is funny?" Kristen reached for Ed. He flinched, and she took his hand and squeezed it. "Edward, you have to tell them. Montoya and Allen. You have to tell them what you did."

He smiled unsteadily. "No. No, you don't understand. I'd lose my job."

Kristen nodded. "Then you do understand how serious this is. I – I can't believe it." She scraped her chair back, tugging Ed to his feet. "Come on. There's a payphone across the street. You can call them now. Maybe if you go willingly and tell them everything, they won't have you charged."

He let her tug him past a waiter, who tapped Ed's shoulder. "Are you ready to pay, sir?"

Kristen threw the waiter a desperate smile. "We'll be right back. Just – give him your credit card, Edward. We're coming back."

Ed dug his wallet from his pocket and passed it wordlessly to the waiter. Cold air and car horns hit them on the street. Kristen pulled him to the curb, searching for a break in the traffic. "Kristen, please. I need this. Fish and Maroni won't ever face a judge. Not one they haven't bribed. It doesn't matter who killed those people. At least if I catch the Stitcher we'll stop the hangings. Evidence against Fish, or Maroni or Falcone or any of the dons, it'll go nowhere. It's useless, Kristen."

She dropped his hand, staring at him like he'd struck her with a brand. "I always knew you were odd, Edward. But at least I thought you were honest."

"I - I _am _honest_._"

"Then please," she nodded to the lit up phone booth. The traffic lights changed to red at the mouth of the street, and the last of the cars and buses roared away, leaving four empty lanes between Ed and the truth. "Tell them. Even if you lose your job. Even if they lock you up. Tell them."

She stepped off the curb, her eyes only for him. Begging him to confess. He had ruined it, he knew. There would be no second date.

He sprang for her. "Kristen, no!"

Startled, she danced away from him, out onto the street. Ed grabbed for her, his foot slipping off the curb – the bus rushing past so close his fingertips burned. Churning Kristen under its wheels.

* * *

_**A/N:**__ She had it coming._

_That's what I think, as a fan of Ed._

_As a fan of Kristen, Ed would probably disagree._

_:D_

_Thank you all for reading and reviewing! Next chapter in 48 hours!_


	8. Between A Rock And A Hard Place

_**A/N:**__ Deprived as we Australians are of all things Gotham, I did see a clip from a recent episode of Cobblepott and Edward's first meeting. Oh my gosh! How cool was that? What do you guys think – did they do it justice?_

* * *

Chapter 8: Between a Rock and Hard Place

He left her at the hospital swamped in tubes and plaster and obscured by a dozen beeping, pulsating machines. It was 2am when Kristen left theatre, after 3 by time Ed finally struggled into his apartment and kicked off his shoes in the hall.

Light from a sign across the street slanted in through the kitchen windows. The air was starchy with the fatigue of the late hour. Ed tossed his jacket on the counter. He pulled at his tie, but his fingers were stiff. He yanked it clumsily over his head instead.

There were papers on the counter. Simple plans. Since the first part of his deception had been to lead Major Crimes from Fish's tail, the logical second step was to fool Harvey and Gordon on the pursuit of the Stitcher. Though harder to manage, it would give Ed a clear window in which to solve the case himself. He had a few ideas on how to accomplish this, the most straightforward being to swap bagged evidence with that from another case. With any luck, the "new" clues would throw Homicide onto an entirely different, incorrect trail.

This solution was unsatisfactory, however. The Stitcher had thrown the GCPD – the entire city – on high alert. People were still at risk of being murdered. And without knowing who was being targeted, nor whether the modification of the murder method would be necessitated by the increased security around the Asylum, Ed couldn't comfortably point Homicide to any evidence without risking it providing an actual lead.

Then there was the matter of Kristen. She might wake up, she might not. Ed wanted her to wake up and be okay more than he had ever wanted his job with the GCPD. But chances were with a head injury she wouldn't remember the conversation she'd been having at the time of the accident. She – well – she might not be herself any more. And so Ed wouldn't have anything to worry about. But there was always the chance that she _would_ wake up, and she _would_ dob him in, and if that happened before Ed had solved the case, there was really nothing he could say or do to save himself. At least if he'd caught the killer he could claim it was all part of some ingenious plot.

Aside from Kristen being hit by a bus. Good God, what had he done?

Ed blinked at the papers on the counter. A phone number for Fish's goons was written along the top of one page. He started as the fridge kicked in, the silence of the apartment undercut by the low thrumming of the motor. The rest of Gotham city seemed very far away.

He peeled the page with Fish's number away from the rest, carrying it between thumb and forefinger and dropping it in the sink. Then he turned on the hot water and let it pour over the page until the numbers were obscured from both the page and from his mind.

Alone, afraid, he went to bed.

* * *

Gotham steamed in the morning sun.

Ed jogged down the street, bagel in a brown paper bag under his arm, dodging foot traffic on his way to the station. It was 8.33 and he wasn't due on until 9, but he was already half an hour later than was habitual.

The stone wall of the station rose on his right. A uniformed officer pushed through the smoked glass doors.

"Hold it, please!"

The uniform pinned the door open and Ed ducked gladly through, thanking her with a smile. She nodded at him round-eyed and followed him into the station.

Ed stumbled to a halt on the first step. Every head in the station swivelled to face him. A hush the GCPD hadn't heard since Victor Zsazs fell over the room. From somewhere to his left he caught a murmur of, "-under a bus-"

The street door swung inwards, knocking the uniformed officer into Ed. She squealed, Ed caught her and echoed the squeal himself when Harvey Bullock took a handful of his jacket and yanked him backwards onto the street. "Sorry folks, question time can wait," Harvey called over his shoulder. "And give the guy a break, right? First date he's had in years."

"That's not true," Ed protested as the door swung shut. Jim Gordon was waiting on the street, hands deep in the pockets of his grey overcoat. He waved and Ed waved back. "Detective Bullock, wait. I had a date just a few months ago-"*

"Yeah, yeah. If I wanted to hear a goddamn tragedy I'd go to the movies." Harvey squinted at Ed a moment. "Hey, you didn't _push_ her under the bus, did you?"

Gordon rolled his eyes. He motioned for Ed to follow him to a dented squad car parked on the curb. "There was an intruder sighting at Arkham just before dawn. Security scared them off. It's probably not our guy, but just in case, we want a couple of forensics to take a look around."

"Oh, ah," Ed hesitated with his hand on the rear door. "Then I should get a ride with the others."

Harvey slid into the passenger seat. "Your choice, buddy, but we're doing you a favour. You took out the office hottie. They're out for blood in there."

Ed looked towards the station. He imagined he could feel the press of eyes against the smoked glass. He climbed into the car.

Behind the wheel, Gordon smirked. "Hold on."

* * *

"-about 6 this morning. Karen spotted him first, over by the north gate. Guy was already on the grounds. No idea how he got over the fence. We went in slow to catch him, but the bastard got wind of us the minute we were on the ground. Never got closer than a hundred yards to him."

Harvey let out a noisy breath which fogged on the chill air. "Where'd you lose him?"

The security guard scratched his big, balding head. "In the trees by the fence. We checked, but I didn't see no scraps of cloth or anything obvious in the branches. Blow me if I know how he got over that fence. Even Jackie Chan'd get stuck in the razor wire."

They were standing under a guard tower on the eastern edge of the Arkham mansion, looking towards the new south bridge connecting the island to Midtown. From this side the posters smothering the fence were a lumpy white mass, looking almost like snow drifts in the shimmering daylight. To their left the banks of the main wards rose as bleak and lifeless as glacial cliffs.

Gordon glanced at Harvey. "If it was our man, he could've had more bodies to dump. They could still be on the grounds."

Ed lifted his pen from his notebook. "It's likely the victims were being kept alive on the island. Testing of soil under the fingernails matched samples taken from the grounds. It seems the victims were brought here, left for a while, and then strung up alive."

"I knew they were being hung alive," Gordon frowned, "but their being kept on the grounds is news. Is that on the coroner's report?"

Harvey shrugged before Ed could answer. "The morgue reports have been all kinds of weird lately. I didn't even get most of the post mortems for this case. Everyone's too obsessed with this goddamn meat locker."

Ed wasn't sure whether to be pleased or not. Harvey's missing reports were in his briefcase, but he'd never thought Bullock would notice them gone.

"It's on the report," he said, which it was, though he wasn't crazy enough to prove it. He looked up at the tower, measuring the line of sight between it and the gate. A car on the bridge parked close to the gate would be obscured. It was possible that someone quite tall could climb up on the roof and then scramble up the gate, but they would have no way of scaling the fence from the inside. Besides, no cars had been reported on the bridge. And anyone escaping via rope or ladder would have stood out starkly against the wall of white-backed posters.

There was always the chance they had used a rope ladder to get over the gate, and then carried the ladder with them into the trees and scaled the fence. Ed's only problem with that solution was the rather long drop from the top of the fence, down the cliff face into the rock-fanged ocean. Anyone who could do _that_ probably wasn't human ... and Ed really hoped they were dealing with a human.

His optimism left few options. One, that the perpetrator was being aerial dropped into the Asylum.

Two, he or she had opened the gate.

Three, he or she was a security guard or other non-noticeable person.

Four, Ed wasn't the first one to find the storm drain.

Gordon said to the security guard, "How thoroughly did you search the island?"

The guard shrugged. "Gee, I dunno. It's a big place. We searched the trees and circled the perimeter. Didn't see hide nor hair of the guy again." The big man shuddered. "Tell ya, he was like a ghost the way he disappeared. Wouldn't surprise me he slipped right through the clock tower wall."

Harvey raised his eyebrows. "You think he could still be here?"

The four of them eyed the clock tower rising sombre and dark from the cracked concrete yard. Gordon's hand brushed his pistol. "It's always a possibility."

They split up, the guard returning the security tower. Ed crossed to the gate to check it was padlocked, feeling eyes on him all the while. He glanced several times over his shoulder to Harvey and Gordon flailing through the trees at the base of the clock tower. Harvey shouted once and fired a shot into the air, bringing down a pigeon. Ed nearly leapt over the fence.

"What?" Harvey snapped as half a dozen security guards rushed over with guns drawn. "It startled me, okay?"

The guards dispersed, muttering. Ed watched them wander away across the weed-ridden forecourt, back to the guard towers groaning under the weight of their own rust, back to the security beat between the empty and forsaken buildings. He wondered what it would be like as an inmate here, now, maybe one of the victims, dragged semi-conscious across the dirt and broken concrete, forced into the sagging mansion. Paint peeled from the old place in strips as long as he was tall, great curls like drying leaves on a dead bud. What would it be like, being trapped in a cage down in the darkness, in the cloying air, immersed in the stench of mildew and your own blood and sweat and shit?

It would be interesting, he thought, his heart rate at a slightly uncomfortably 160bpm. But it was the kind of experience he'd rather read about on the coroner's report.

"Hell!"

Harvey's shout drew him back to reality. Twenty yards east of the clock tower, Bullock was stooped over the big steel disc of a sewer drain.

"I nearly broke my neck tripping over this," Harvey complained as Gordon and Ed drew near. He pried a dead branch into a hole in the cap and levered it onto the grass. The three men peered into a well of grey gloom, the scent of the sea gusting up to greet them.

Ed checked line of sight to the security tower. They were by the far southern corner of the mansion here, close to end of the trees where the mansion's south facing wall dominated the cliff top. Hanks of yellow grass poked from the cracked brown earth. Shrubs bordering the tree line reached to waist height. Most of the tower was obscured by the bulk of the mansion, the sheltered guard platform itself lost behind the sagging eaves. Line of sight of the drain from either the ground or the tower was virtually nil.

Harvey nudged Gordon. "Well? You first, hero."

Gordon frowned into the darkness. "I could use a torch."

"It's about thirty feet down," Ed told him. "Gauging by the height of the cliffs, that is."

Harvey checked over his shoulder. He was met by a wall of trees. "How the hell do you know how high the cliffs are?"

Because he'd been at the foot of them, obviously. Ed smiled. "It's really simple. Was trigonometry a strong point for you in school, detective? All you need to do-"

"I change my mind," said Harvey. "I don't want to know."

Gordon lowered himself onto the ladder carved into the drain's cement wall. He glanced up at Ed. "You sure it's not a long drop? These rungs are coated in moss."

"Thirty feet is a long drop, detective. If you fall, you risk serious head and spinal injuries. Do you know, over 540 000 people die every year from falls. You could-"

"Ed!" Harvey barked, and Ed felt himself relax. Just like old times. "Get moving. You're next."

"Ah. Me?"

"Yes!"

A breathless five minutes later, Ed stood at the mouth of the sewer, ankle deep in freezing water, gulping salt air as he stared out across the wide grey river.

Harvey splashed through the tunnel. "This isn't in use any more, right? There's no shit in here?"

Ed stepped onto the now underwater beach which had hugged the cliff base at low tide, tipping his head at what first appeared to be a miniature dolphin fin bobbing in the small waves. It was maybe fifteen feet out from the cliff wall. He started towards it, but the submerged shelf ended, and he drew hastily back rather than plunge into the unknown depths. No, that wasn't a delightfully tiny dolphin frolicking in the waves. What it was, in fact, was a nose.

A human nose. All of that bobbed above the surface of a human body.

In a moment of madness Ed turned away from it, thinking to usher the detectives back into the drain and never speak of it again. He had found the meat locker and regretted it ever since. And this, a nose, did not bode well at all.

But then Gordon had seen it, and he waded across the narrow beach and dove into the river water with Harvey shouting after him as if he was the one swimming in a suit fifteen feet from a sewage outlet. Treading water, Gordon wrapped his arms around the submerged body, a white face following the white nose from the water, a bloated slash across the throat, pumping orange down the neck as Gordon towed the body back to shore. Harvey and Ed took an arm each and hauled the body onto the beach.

Gordon dropped to his knees in the shallow water. "Too late for resuscitation?"

Crouching across the body from him, Ed felt for a pulse. The corpse was as dead as it looked. "Uh huh. I'd say we're four hours too late. Cause of death was probably exsanguination via the severed carotid artery."

Harvey clapped a hand over his mouth. "You think this guy's our escapee, or the next victim?"

"He could have washed in from anywhere on the tide," Gordon said, but none of them believed it. He glanced at Ed. "I'm going with victim. Let's say Stitcher dragged him over here with the intention of stowing him in the Asylum. The guards spooked our guy and he figured it was easier to dump the vic than to try again later."

"How'd he get up the ladder?" Harvey asked. "He sure as hell wasn't carried up."

Gordon bunched his face. He looked along the cliff back towards the bridge, where the rising tide had obscured the little beach connecting the bridge to the sewer mouth. "Forget the ladder. How'd he get the body here? He didn't swim with a conscious man this size from the bridge."

"Boat?" Ed suggested. His aerial drop hypothesis was becoming appealing. "Or plane?"

Harvey nudged him with his boot. "This is why you stick to the dead. Though a boat ain't a bad idea. Maybe we oughta check out the marinas."

A gull settled on the waves, watching the men with beady yellow eyes. Ed pulled a pair of latex gloves from his jacket. The vic was middle-aged, tall and slightly fat, dressed only in a singlet and a pair of hole-pocked Y-fronts. The slash wound on his throat was the closest he'd had to a shave in several weeks, and there were puckered scars on the inside of his elbows. Maybe a junkie, maybe a cancer patient. Ed ran his fingertip over the faint ridges of scarring on the man's shaved head. A strange scar, one that seemed to encompass the entire crown of the skull. Perhaps he'd had a brain tumour?

"What's that?" Harvey rolled the man's arm over with the toe of his shoe. An eight-digit number had been tattooed on the interior forearm. The ink was blurred, old, and Ed recognised it with a start.

"That's a prisoner number," Gordon muttered. "8990-6512-86. At least we'll get a positive ID on him."

The second last part of the puzzle clicked into place.

What do a nurse, a psychiatrist, a building inspector and an inmate have in common?

Their stint in Arkham Asylum.

* * *

_*The date Ed is referring to here was with a cute little filing clerk by the name Rita Reece-Thurston. She seemed nice and it was all going well until she took Ed back to her apartment and tried to eat him. Turns out she was keeping her last date in bags in the freezer. The woeful tale of Ed and Rita Rita Flesheater did the rounds of the station for weeks._

* * *

_**A/N:**__ Ooooh now we're getting serious! Next chapter will be up on Tuesday (Monday US time.) I only hope, being so far behind with episodes, that I'm not butchering too much of the show's lore. The Asylum I'm using is a cross between the layout in the game Arkham Asylum and what little I saw of it on the show._

_Thanks to everyone who agreed Kristen had it coming. A bus coming, that is. Enjoy your weekend, see you soon!_


	9. Silence Is Golden

_**A/N:**__ Good evening, Gothamites. Tonight I bring you a very exciting announcement. We've hit the last four chapters of this little ol' story. I'll be posting Tuesdays and Fridays until there ain't no more to post._

_Lemme tell ya, Bats, the gloves are off. We're about to go some daaaaark places._

* * *

Chapter 9: Silence is Golden

"They'll have it in no time."

A bulkhead of bears and flowers dwarfed the bed. Boxes of chocolates and get-well cards obscured every flat surface, some tacked pinned to the IV stand, flowers tied to the iron bed end. Most of the machines were gone now, only the IV drips chugging along, morphine and saline solution to keep her pain free and hydrated. That was, if Kristen was in there at all amongst the flowers and cords.

Ed sat on the edge of the bed, hoping Kristen didn't wake up because he was undoubtedly the last person she wanted to see. He would have preferred to sit in the visitor's chair, but that was being used to hold gift bags, and he wouldn't be long anyway.

"They haven't found the records yet. Those are somewhere in the Asylum. But they will. And then they'll know who did it, and this will all've been in vain."

He barked a laugh, a startlingly sad little cry even to his own ears. He found her cold hand on the white sheet, held it for a moment, and dropped it, ashamed.

"I'm afraid, Miss Kringle. I want to stop, but if I don't keep going, I'm afraid it will only get worse." He thought of his briefcase and the notes he had stolen. He thought of the marina report he'd hastily patched together and dropped on Gordon's desk. There was every chance they'd see through it, and they'd know he did it. But if they didn't, then he had at least bought himself a night. One night to solve a murder. And one clue where to start.

He could do nothing to help Kristen.

It was time to see Fish Mooney.

* * *

Fish, resplendent in a figure hugging ultramarine dress and crescent moon earrings, was talking and laughing with a handsome young man when Ed walked into the club.

She caught Ed's eye over the young man's shoulder. One blue-clawed hand swiped at another table, ushering Ed to sit and wait. He stood awkwardly for a moment by the bar, calculating how much time he had before Gordon and Harvey realised one of their marina patron lists was a fake. He'd dropped it on the desk at the end of Gordon's shift, meaning Jim had probably seen it before he left the station. If Gordon had seen it, then he would act on it, because the print out was for Riverside Docks, the closest marina to the south side of the Asylum. If the Stitcher was accessing the Asylum by boat, his most convenient and least travelled route would be from Riverside.

Noticing Ed was still hanging by the bar, Fish gestured again for him to sit down. With nothing else for it, Ed did.

A few minutes later the barkeep brought him a drink. "Rusty nail, courtesy of Ms Mooney," the barkeep told him.

Ed really didn't like the implication of that.

"Maybe I should have bought you a screw instead," Fish purred as she took her seat a quarter hour later. Ed hadn't touched the drink. The last thing he needed tonight was to be buzzed. Fish's hand slid over his, plucking the pencil from his grasp. "What's this? A puzzle?"

Ed scrunched the scrap of paper in his palm. "Bridges. It's a Japanese game. You have to join the dots to connect the right number of bridges to the islands-"

"I get it." Fish's golden eyes flicked him up and down. Her scent was sumptuous. Jasmine and cloves and – yes – death. Tonight her lips were painted gold. She traced them with her tongue. Ed gulped. Fish's laugh purred low in her throat. "I should give you credit. Those nuisance detectives haven't been around all week. I assume that's thanks to you."

It was the work of several seconds to suffocate his guilt. Ed smiled to unwind his tension. "Can you tell me what a nurse, a psychiatrist and an inmate all have in common?"

Fish pursed her lips, her fingertips dancing on her jawbone. "Tell me."

"They all have personal records at Arkham Asylum." Ed recognised her surprise with a flicker of satisfaction. "Someone who knew them very well is killing these people. I need you to get me into the Asylum. Tonight."

* * *

Earlier that day as the other forensics worked frantically to compile lists of patrons of every marina and harbour in Gotham, Ed had committed himself to two entirely different tasks.

The first he began by plotting a map of Gotham with the location of every marina, dock, harbour and beach spread over the city, as well as a good deal of those on the nearby mainland. He then compared this with a map of the last known locations of Asylum killer's victims.

None of the victims had been abducted from the mainland. Ed crossed the mainland harbours from his map. Only one had been taken in Uptown, another two in Downtown. By and large the victims had been assailed somewhere in Midtown – three of them within two hundred yards of the 819 bus's stop near the south Arkham bridge.

It was a chance he had to take. Ed crossed out every harbour outside a two hundred yard radius of the bus stop. Of the two left one dealt exclusively with ferries to and from the mainland. The other, Riverside Docks, faced onto the river rather than the bay, was privately owned and down on its luck. When Ed called the place asking for the patron list the answering machine told him the owner wouldn't be back until April. Two months from now.

"No fax machine," he told the nearest forensic. "I'll drive down and get the manifest."

"Whatever, man," the guy grumbled, shifting away from him. Kristen's friend in Forensics was telling everyone Ed had pushed Kristen under the bus. Proving her wrong was a little low on Ed's priorities list at the moment, what with the murders and the possible loss of his job or even freedom should he be caught and charged with obstructing the law, but it was something he'd have to get around to eventually.

"That's for Riverside Docks. I've got it covered, okay?"

The forensic didn't reply. Ed left the lab amidst a cloud of glares. He caught the 816 to Midtown station and walked the rest of the way to the river. Arkham Asylum stood impassive, unavoidable across the water. Ed's heart drummed. He knew it wouldn't be long. The Asylum was waiting for him.

He found Riverside Docks on a quiet street a few blocks from the bridge. A half dozen warehouses and a roads maintenance company fronted the water either side of the handful of jetties. The marina's only building was an aging boat shed doubling as an office, built from grubby yellow brick and separated from its neighbours by a seven foot high tin fence. Ed stepped over the low chain-link balustrade separating the sidewalk from the marina's overgrown parking lot. What windows he could see were boarded up, a bright red spray tag over the door. BIENVENUE A L'OBSCURITE! it read.

Ed hadn't been aware there was much of a French presence in Gotham. He rapped on the office door. It was thin and still smelled of pine, probably replaced in the last week. There was one car in the parking lot, but grass poked through its headlights and it was sitting on bricks, and Ed dismissed it from his mind.

He gave the ghosts a minute to answer the door. When none did, checking over his shoulder for witnesses, he strode around the side of the marina, taking a moment to survey the collection of battered dinghy's and tinnies bobbing in the foamy water. A cracked concrete ramp led up to a double roller door at the back of the building. The roller door was padlocked and spray tagged with a big red X. A dusty window overlooked an office off to the right of the doors.

Ed pried a lump of fractured concrete from the corner of the ramp, cracking it twice against the office window before the glass splintered. He didn't wait for the alarm but used the lump of concrete to clear a hole in the fractured glass, then reached through and unlatched the window. The alarm started just as he pushed the window open.

Heart pounding, he leant into the office, scattering the papers on the desk. No patron manifest there. Hearing voices on the street he climbed through the window and yanked it shut behind him. He crouched on broken glass listening as footsteps thudded around the side of the building. A shadow appeared in the window. Ed flattened himself against the wall.

"Anyone in there? Shit, kids again. Brats broke the window."

"Little punks."

"Should we go in?"

"Aw, hell no. Ain't worth risking my neck for. For all we know, Stitcher could be hiding out in there."

Ed felt the blood drain from his face. He sure hoped the Stitcher wasn't hiding in the marina.

"Maybe we should call the cops."

"Yeah, right. When was the last time the GCPD did somethin' around here? Let Marley deal with it when he gets back."

The shadows retreated from the window. Ed slumped against the desk. He eyed the office door. What lay beyond was probably a small reception area opening onto the parking lot and a garage space for boats. With any luck it was short on homicidal maniacs.

Still, he was spooked. He waited until the footsteps had receded around the side of the building, then pulled on his latex gloves and ransacked the desk. A patron manifest two years out of date was lying at the bottom of the second drawer, mug ringed and yellowed. Ed folded it under his jacket. He could memorise the names on the bus. It shouldn't be too hard to make a false copy of the list to give to Gordon.

Quietly, ears straining, Ed let himself from the window, around the side of the marina, and away.

* * *

His second item of business before visiting Kristen was a purely mental exercise. There were over a hundred and seventy names on the Riverside Docks manifest, and Ed was determined to memorise every one. The very last thing he wanted to do was compare documents in the musty darkness of Arkham Asylum. Just accessing the records was going to be difficult enough.

By quitting time he'd memorised the list, manufactured a false record for Gordon and Harvey, and learnt a useful fact about the body they'd found bobbing in the morning's tide, courtesy of his fellow forensics. The victim's name was Timothy Knutch, aged 45, last seen at an anti-construction protest rally yesterday evening.

Knutch had been asked to speak at the rally, an offer he declined. An ex-inmate of Arkham Asylum, Knutch was considered one of the few psychiatric patients "cured" during his incarceration. He was known to police on the mainland for his involvement in peaceful protests against institutionalisation of the mentally ill, and had only last year moved back to Gotham to protest Arkham's reopening.

Last night's rally was a perfect time for him to give voice to his opinions – it was beyond Ed to say why he had declined. Perhaps he had a sore throat.

Or perhaps he had known there was a killer in the crowd.

* * *

There was no need to drive out to the south bridge from Mooney's Club, but Alvaro did so anyway, because Fish had told him to.

They parked near the bus stop, Alvaro so supremely unconcerned about his car he didn't even bother locking it. The kids tossing rocks at the bus shelter took one look at Alvaro and Mickey and took off down the street.

Alvaro smirked. He and Mickey were both big guys, Mickey broad-shouldered and blond, Alvaro dark-haired and built like a Lego Arnold Schwarzenegger. Whenever he looked at Ed, Ed's knee began to ache. Tonight the goons were suited up much the same as Ed, except where Ed had his briefcase and a flashlight, Fish's men had 9mm pistols and shock sticks.

They crossed the bridge in silence. A deep purple twilight settled over the mainland like some great roosting bird, bringing out the gold of the roads and houses on the black bank of the land. Violet tinged the bay water, a light breeze carrying the stench of seaweed and dirty water from the waves slurping at the pylons. Ahead, the Asylum rose black, silent.

"Looks like the gate's locked," said Mickey, helpfully, as they reached it.

Ed stepped over the railing and dropped off the bridge. Water sloshed to his knees. Little tremors of pain coursed the length of his left leg, but he would not give Alvaro the satisfaction of falling. He extracted a flashlight from the pocket of his overcoat and shined it smiling at his bodyguards. "Come on down. The water's fine."

Alvaro and Mickey exchanged an uneasy look. "This ain't some ruse to drown us, is it?" Alvaro called.

Ed shrugged and splashed away along the submerged beach. "If you're scared, turn back."

He grinned at the twin crashes of water behind him. "The plan is simple," he said. "Ahead is a drainpipe. That's our access to the island. Alvaro, you go first, you'll have to lift the drain cap. Once inside, stick to the wall on your left. There's a guard tower directly ahead of it, but if you stay in the shadows and keep an eye out for patrols, we won't be seen. Follow the wall around into a courtyard. At the back of the courtyard there's a small door leading into the Asylum mansion. That's where the records are kept. That's where we need to be. The patrols should stick outside, meaning if we're quiet, we can get in and out without hassle."

"Some covert shit right here," Mickey grumbled. "I don't do quiet."

_That's why you're last up the ladder_, Ed thought. He beamed at Mickey. "You'll be fine. They're only security guards."

There were currently twenty one security guards on Arkham Island. That was a full seven patrols. Plus a couple of uniforms parked out in a van by the north gate. Of murderers, victims and corpses, there may have been hundreds.

Crime scene tape criss-crossed the sewer mouth. The GCPD'd had to call in Coast Patrol to pick up Knutch's body; there was no way Gordon, Harvey and Ed could drag him up the mossy ladder before the tide rose.

Ed pulled on a fresh pair of gloves before brushing aside the tape. He peered into the well of darkness that was the sewer drain, and it peered into him. How many secrets were hiding in Arkham Asylum? How many lives had been lost in that oblivion of darkness and mildew?

He glanced over his shoulder, one last look at the bay cloaked in purple dusk reflecting the golden lights of Gotham City. To the black well of the drain he murmured, "Bienvenue à l'obscurité."

* * *

_**A/N:**__ Next chapter: into the Asylum!_

_Fish gouging her own eye out was absolutely amazing. Ten out of ten for spoon fu._


	10. What You Don't Know Will Kill You

_**A/N:**__ *Manic laughter*_

_Let's do this._

* * *

Chapter 10: What You Don't Know Will Kill You

They found the Asylum grounds slumbering in the dusk. A light was on in the security tower, a single bare bulb rigged by a cord forty feet to the platform. There was a foot patrol over by the Botanical Gardens, but nothing that would stop Ed and the goons following the mansion wall around to the courtyard.

That was, until Mickey's boot sent a stone skittering across the forecourt.

The trio flattened themselves against the wall, Ed feeling paint flaking under his gloved palms. They'd almost reached the corner of the mansion; only twenty yards separated them from the guard tower.

Voices stirred on the platform. "D'you hear that? Sounded like someone in the trees."

"Probably a bird."

"We should check it. Drain's over that way."

Footsteps thundered down the metal grill stairs. Ed swallowed. He'd come prepared for this, although he'd hoped to delay it a little longer.

Bracing his foot against the wall, he grabbed Mickey's arm and shoved him from the shadow of the mansion. Bright blond-headed Mickey stumbled onto the forecourt with a shout – and froze in horror as three guns trained on his chest.

"Stop right there!"

Mickey threw Ed a horrified glance, then spun on his heel and sprinted for the drain.

"Hey! That's him! Get him!"

Three security guards pounded by in hot pursuit. Ed and Alvaro clung to the wall, Alvaro's eyes round as pennies, any protest he might have offered smothered by Ed's hand over his mouth.

There was a scrape of the metal cap being yanked open, and a shriek as Mickey plunged into the darkness. Ed looked sideways at Alvaro.

"He'll be fine. Move, now, while they're distracted."

Alvaro's throat worked. He nodded, once. Together he and Ed slunk the final twenty yards and hooked around the corner into the courtyard.

Ed pulled ahead of him, passing low gardens of weeds and splintered benches, skirting a fountain whose foul smelling water spilled brown over its mouldy sides. The courtyard was a small space, perhaps once used by doctors on their coffee breaks or private consultations with well-behaved patients. Now rotting leaves made a carpet over the cracked cement and piled like black snow against the walls. The plaster sculpture which ran along the top of the free-standing wall peeled off in great grey scabs. All Ed smelled was rot and stagnant water.

A single door opened from the courtyard, accessed by stone steps slick with moss. It was locked. No surprise. Listening to the distant shouts, Ed nodded to Alvaro. The big man put his shoulder to the door, ramming it twice, three times, before the door flew off its hinges and crashed down hard in the mouldering passageway.

"Oops," said Alvaro.

Ed didn't waste time glaring. He either found the name of the killer tonight, or he went to prison for obstruction of justice. He had come too far to turn back.

They replaced the door as well as they could in its frame. Anyone who tested the door or even looked closely would see it was busted, but it would have to do. Ed flicked the flashlight over the piles of papers and sagging shelves lining the narrow side room. It was impossible to say at a glance whether there was anything of value here. There certainly didn't seem to be; possibly there was nothing of value in the entire Asylum. Ed's nose twitched as his lungs pumped mildew infected air.

Tucking the flashlight under his arm, he propped his briefcase open against his belly and dug out a pair of facemasks. He passed one to Alvaro, who stood sniffing by the door.

"It'll stop you inhaling mould spores."

"Gracias."

They moved together through a carved wooden door into the lofty main hall. The flashlight cast the faintest silvery glow over the rafters. It didn't reach the far wall at all. An alcove to the right opened onto the main foyer, but the record room was further on, accessed by a door in the far wall.

A few steps dropped onto carpet black with water stains and mould, the pale grey caps of mushrooms rising from bowed floorboards where the water sat in brown puddles. What furniture inhabited the main hall was discarded, dumped here like the stacks of papers in the foyer and the alcoves. Candlesticks and little chairs, broken desks and un-upholstered cushions. Cobwebs hung in hanks like hair from the rafters, thick by the walls, but even in the central walkway invisible threads fell all the way to the floor.

Alvaro scratched his arms. "I don't like spiders."

"What has six legs, two wings, and can't move a muscle?"

"I dunno."

"A fly trapped in a web."

Alvaro stopped. "That's not funny."

Ed squelched on into the filmy darkness. "It wasn't a joke."

Something banged against the wall high above them. Alvaro ducked and Ed shot the flashlight at the noise. The beam caught only webs, beaded with the bodies of ten thousand spiders. Ed let the flashlight drift to the carpet. He frowned at the outline of a boot in a pool of mould.

"It's the roof cooling," he told Alvaro, his heart thrumming a frantic tattoo. "That's all."

Alvaro crept after him to the end of the hall. They found the door to the archives unlocked, which was something. Ed wasn't sure his nerves would have endured Alvaro smashing it open. Somewhere here, someone was watching them. He was sure of it.

"Fear without evidence is paranoia," he murmured, heedless to the sharp look Alvaro shot him. They slunk through the archive door. A thin balcony circled three walls. Reading rooms were tucked away behind cages of bookshelves and narrow brass bars. Two tall aisles of books ran down the centre of the room. Filing cabinets lined the balcony. The cobwebs were thinner here, but even through the masks the stench of mildew and rot was nauseating.

Ed hadn't the faintest idea where to start. There might have been five hundred book cases here: there might have been a thousand. But if the information he wanted was anywhere in Gotham, it was here.

He thumbed a book from the nearest shelf and handed it to Alvaro. "Start here. There are gas lights in the reading rooms. If you can't get it to work, call me."

"What am I looking for?"

"Patient and employee records dated Arkham's final year of operation." Alvaro was close enough for Ed to smell his fear, sharp and unpleasant on his tongue. What would a man like Alvaro have to fear from a place like Arkham? Perhaps he was afraid of being left here alone. Ed ran a tongue across the back of his teeth, but he could not rid himself of the unpleasant taste. "We want names. Names and dates."

The big man nodded. "Any names in particular?"

His mental list of the Riverside Docks patron manifest was too much to go through. Softly, with a flicker of his habitual smile, he said, "I have no idea. We'll see when we go through the records. So long as our killer isn't going by an alias."

He found a lamp with enough oil to run in one of the four reading rooms. Alvaro carried a stack of folders in with him. The room was closest to the door. No light penetrated the dust encrusted windows.

With Alvaro set up, Ed prowled the aisles. Many of the books were medical histories of asylums predating Arkham. There were patient files of people six generations dead, of doctors so ancient their apprenticeships had been conducted on stolen bodies. These brittle pages crumbled under Ed's careful fingers and sagged from their water-logged spines. A drip from the ceiling had swollen a shelf's contents to twice their size, books erupting onto the floor, now no more readable than leaves in a pool of mud.

"Um, Mr Nygma?" Alvaro stood at the end of the aisle. Ed glanced up from a tome on Jeremiah Arkham. "Where's a man take a leak around here?"

Ed drew a creased piece of paper from his pocket. On it was his game of bridges. Except rather than islands, Ed's bridges connected rooms in Arkham mansion. "Looks like you'll need to retrace your steps to the main hall and take the first left."

Alvaro shambled for the door. He paused. "Hey. Uh. You want the name of the killer, right?"

Ed nodded.

"So ... how were you planning on arresting him?"

It took a single moment for all of Ed's assumptions to come crashing down. Adrenaline hit him in a tidal wave and he slapped the book into the shelf. Pain blossomed in his knee. He had been wrong. The killer wasn't an ex-Arkham employee. The killer was Fish. He was trapped in the Asylum with a murderer's henchman.

Alvaro scratched his neck. "Like, I know you're with the GCPD. But aren't you in Forensics? I thought you'd have to have a detective's warrant to make an arrest. Or did you arrange that already?"

Ed just blinked at him.

The big man shrugged to himself, turning back towards the door. "Not that it's any of my business."

Not until the door clicked shut did Ed let out a breath. He left Jeremiah's biography on the shelf and moved to the next section. Manila folders on a steel shelf interspaced thick, yellowing binders. Ed drew out one at random. The cursive hand squirmed under the torch light. _En – plog – oe – _no, _Employee Medical Records –_

Ed grabbed an armload of binders and headed for the reading room. He soon discarded the first, dated April 1953, dropping it beside the bureau which filled most of the space between the shelves.

The binders were in no particular order. The fifth in the stack was dated 11 years prior, one year before the Asylum had shut its gates. Close enough. Ed flipped it open on the desk. Water damage rendered the bottom left of each page illegible, but for the most part the names were clear and black in the amber light of the lamp. The bulk of the binder was taken up with the details of new treatment plans, but the first dozen pages contained short references to current staff.

"Bingo!"

There she was, page three. Kym Katee, psychiatrist. The victom Ed had accidentally dropped from the clock tower balcony. Her description said she worked with newly arrived patients in the intensive treatment ward. There was not much else about her, other than her birthdate, indicating she was 36 at the time of her medical examination, and that she was of sound body and mind.

Nikolas Ozolinsh was listed on page five. Aged 45, Ozolinsh was a senior psychiatrist in the solitary confinement ward. His own psychiatrist expressed doubts about Ozolinsh's suitability for the job. Apparently Ozolinsh had expressed doubt about the Asylum's treatment methods. A message had been added under Ozolinsh's entry in blue ink. _In for one, in for all. Family shall not betray family._ Ed was at a loss to say what it meant.

He moved on. Joon Myeong Song, Peony Norman, Robina Frances, Olga Peak; every one of them was listed in the decade-old record. Those that were missing, Karl Waterman, Jarod Augustine and the most recent Timothy Knutch, were contractors in the case of the first two, inmates in the case of Knutch.

Ed dropped the record to the desk. He grinned at the cobwebs hanging motionless from the ceiling fan. So he was right. The killer had a history with Arkham, either as an employee or a patient. He had known it would feel good to be right, but he had no idea how good. Just wait until they heard this at the precinct! He laughed aloud in the circle of gaslight.

"But why?" he asked the fan, he asked the shelves. There were notes in the records of Song and Peak too that they doubted the Asylum's treatment regimes. Peak even refused to be present during electric shock therapies. And Timothy Knutch, the reformed inmate, was an outspoken opponent of the Asylum's reopening.

Except for last night. Last night Knutch had declined to say anything against the Asylum. Perhaps Maroni had gotten to him. The killings had been bad enough for the Asylum's reputation without the protest rally. It was easy enough to image Maroni or Falcone on damage control.

Yet obviously neither Maroni nor Falcone would have ordered Knutch dumped on the Asylum grounds, nor anywhere near it, even if he had spoken out against the reopening. So then ... one was lead to believe it was not Knutch's outspokenness, but rather his _silence_ that had seen him slashed throated and bobbing in the tide.

He flicked through the record, searching for names he recognised. If the killer was a contractor, as he may well be, then it was going to take all night to find his record. Then there was the matter of the arrest. He scrolled the final page of names. Jeremy Victor, John Vincent, Aaron An Vo ...

His finger hesitated on Aaron An Vo. The name rang a bell. He searched his mental list, but the nearest he could come up with was Erin Ahn Vo. Wrong gender, whatever the name.

He read the entry. Aaron An Vo. A psychiatric nurse in the intensive treatment ward. Age 32 at the time of the record. _Mr Vo's physical appearance continues to be at odds with his kind-hearted and sometimes effeminate nature._

That was it. Vo was in good health but perhaps an uncomfortable mind space. That didn't make him a murderer.

"Alvaro?" Ed called, hearing a floorboard creak. He pushed back from the table. "Have you found anything on the contractors?"

A heartbeat passed in silence.

A figure wrapped in shadow slunk into the reading room.

It wasn't Alvaro.

But it was Erin Ahn Vo.

* * *

"Bloody hell."

Gordon glanced at Harvey in the passenger seat. "What are you, English?"

"Jesus shitting Christ," Harvey breathed. "Is that better?"

"It's so-so."

They were in the fourth hour of a seemingly endless night spent verifying the names and addresses on the marina patron lists. While the task had been split between eight homicide detectives and another ten uniforms, Harvey and Gordon had apparently drawn the bung lists.

"Riverside-damn-Docks," Harvey spat, flapping the manifest on the dashboard. He fought the urge to shred the paper and dump it out the window. "I thought we were onto a good thing with this list. Rundown shithole right on the river, closest marina to the Asylum. Most of the people on here don't even own boats!"

"Easy, pal," Gordon crooned. "Why don't we just forget about Riverside? We'll move onto the next list."

"What, Uptown? You think some silver-spoon prick is dragging corpses to the Asylum? Hell, Jim, those rich bastards can't wait for Arkham open day. They don't want all this bad publicity."

Gordon shrugged. "Maybe it's a kid gone bad."

"It's a kid hauling corpses up a thirty foot drain pipe, that's what it goddamn is."

So he had a point. Gordon drummed his fingers on the wheel. "Okay, how's this. We'll go over to Riverside Docks and check it ourselves. Maybe whoever's working there faxed us the wrong manifest."

Harvey's face puckered so hard he almost flipped inside-out. "I don't know shit about who's working there, but this ain't a fax. It's a goddamn print out. Looks new as shit to me, and it's got Riverside Docks Patron Manifest written on the top."

"But it's not new." Jim took the sheet before Harvey could ball it in his fist. "Because it's wrong."

Harvey unhooked the mic from the comms unit. "Let's find out." The comm speaker crackled. "Yeah, get me forensics, will ya? I want to know which dipshit tech gave us this list."

Gordon scanned the list of names printed alongside addresses. There were five sheets. He and Harvey had made it through the first two. Gordon flipped to the first.

T. Adams, 288-A Red Corner, Haysville

H. Ahearn, 1559 Bay View St, Reatton

I. Allen, 76 Nathorst Walk, Jerold

S. Anderson, 678 State Ave, Haysville

L. Aramini, 8771 Main Street, Gainsly

I. Asmus, 98-1-1 Harlow Close, West Harlow

S. Azzopardi, 43-5B Banks St, Haysville

T. Bach, 120-A Exchange Rd, Reatton

I. Backer, 65-C Glass Crescent, Stevensberg

S. Baj, 1001-10-2 Sigil Road, Gainsly

A. Baggio, 904 Cashley Circuit, Stevensberg

F. Banijamali, 811-2A China Street, West Harlow

A. Barone, 71 Arena Avenue, Reatton

K. Beattie, 154-B15 Roostville Road, Haysville

E. Bellato, 21-2 Hinkley Creek Road, Stevensberg

"Yeah, Forensics Department?" Harvey barked into the mic.

"Hold it." Gordon twisted the volume on the console, and the static fell dead. "You don't need to ask. I know who made this list."

"What? Whaddaya mean, made it?"

Gordon traced the initials. "THIS LIST IS A FAKE. How many people do you know who'd write that?"

Harvey let loose a long growl terminating with him slapping the mic down. "God damn it, Ed!"

* * *

_**A/N:**__ No more complaining for me. I did some internet spoon fu and caught up with every episode. Absolutely loving the show. I wish I could hit Kristen Kringle with another bus. What is she, anyway, crazy? She dated the narcopolice! Narcopopo! __**NARCOPOPO.**__ Bree (from Questions Without Answers) is right. Ed needs to find another lady. Maybe if I leave him alive, he will do just that. Mwahahahahaahahaha._

_If you ever want someone to chat Gotham stuff with, tweet me at AnnequeMalchien._


	11. Alone With A Monster

_**A/N:**__ I love my readers. I hope this chapter scares the shit out of you._

* * *

Chapter 11: Alone With A Monster

She stood in the doorway, 6'8", 280 pounds, naturally muscular and bulging out all over her black tank top and grey sweats pants.

She didn't speak as she moved towards Ed, a drifting continent of a human being, moving silently across the floor to engulf him or to rip him down, he didn't know yet.

His shoulders bounced gently against a bookshelf. His breath came so fast it whistled in his throat. The muscles in his arms and stomach clenched convulsively. "Don't touch me," he breathed as she towered over him. He raised an arm in defence. "Don't touch me!"

Erin Ahn Vo grabbed his wrist and twisted him into the bookshelf. Before Ed could react she had a handful of his hair, yanked his head back and slammed him face first into the shelf. His chin caught the shelf, his glasses snapping against an unyielding spine, glass spearing him under one eye.

Ed's knees buckled. His head struck a filing cabinet as he fell but Vo grabbed him before he fell. Her massive formed writhed above him like a thunderhead of snakes. One arm wrapped around his waist and tossed him over her shoulder.

The light of the oil lamp smeared in Ed's vision like a long exposure photograph of the full moon. He reached for it, gauging it was somewhere between a million and five hundred billion miles away, and it slipped away beneath his fingertips, the last beacon of comfort in a world mired in darkness.

He thumped a fist against Erin's back, caught her thigh with his shoe. She didn't flinch. Alvaro – alive? Either way, he'd been gone for long enough that he was unlikely to be of any help. He'd either fled or been captured, by security or by Vo, it hardly mattered.

Which was a shame, really. Because Alvaro and security pretty much summed up the list of people who were likely to come looking for Ed in Arkham. Everyone else would assume he'd taken a day off, if they noticed he was missing at all.

They were moving away from the main hall. He tried to keep track of corridors and turns as Vo carried him effortlessly through the ranks of cobwebs and broken furniture. But his knowledge of the mansion's layout was almost entirely anecdotal, what he had pieced together from the CSIs as well as his short hike from the main door to the clock tower. Darkness swirled in his vision and his mind, rapid-fire bursts of memory framing a disjointed image. Vo had the torch and Ed saw only ghosts.

Finally she stepped into the rattling cage of an elevator. As Ed reached for a hold on the brass bars his mind clicked where he was. There was only one elevator in the mansion. It was over by the warden's office, linking the small second floor library with the clerk offices below. He was a long, long way from the main entrance. He was a long, long way from home.

His fingers were wrenched from the bars, stomach flip-flopping as Vo heaved him onto the elevator floor. The little cage juddered underneath them. Ed rolled onto his side and Vo's boot caught him in the chest and scuttled him against the cage bars.

He was still gagging for breath when she stepped out of the elevator.

"W- wait!" Each word burned his lungs. "Who are you? What – what do you want?"

Maybe if he played dumb, she wouldn't kill him.

Fat chance. Vo hit the button for the elevator. Ed flattened against the floor as it rose in jarring series of shrieking cords and malfunctioning brakes. He felt the cage slap the side of the shaft as Vo grabbed a hold of the counterweight cable. In the reflected torchlight the cage bars cut crazy shadows over the ceiling.

Ed tried to rise, and couldn't. His body was a mass of aches with no discrete points of reference. Pain made him sicker than he could ever remember being. He wrapped his hands around the cage bars and clung on with his breath too thin to plead.

Vo snapped the counterweight cable in a hand like a mechanised vice. The cage toppled, caught on the brakes, toppled again, ripped the brakes from the wall with a shriek of rust and plummeted two stories into the well below the ground floor.

As the dust rose in silence, she walked away.

* * *

Harvey pressed the buzzer for the fifth time. He slouched against the wall, calling into the comm. "Nygma!"

Pacing in the foyer of Ed's Downtown apartment block, Gordon shook his head. "Face it, Harvey. He's not in."

"Of course he's in!" Harvey snapped. "Where else would he be? He just doesn't want to talk to us!"

Gordon paused by the stairwell, hand over his mouth. "Why would he lie to us?"

"Why would he leave us a stupid riddle telling us he was lying to us?" Harvey pounded the buzzer. "Ed! Get your ass down here!"

A Latino woman with a baby on her hip appeared on the stairwell. She fluttered her fingers at Gordon. "You're looking for Mr Nygma? I didn't hear him come in tonight."

Harvey caught Gordon's eye. "That so?" he pushed away from the wall. "You usually hear him?"

The woman shrugged. "He's right next door. Sometimes he drives us crazy with the noise from his video games, and I ain't never known another young man to cry when he gets it wrong on _Jeopardy_. But I haven't heard anything 'sides the fridge from his apartment since this morning."

"There you go," said Gordon, "he's not here. Where else would he go?"

Harvey dismissed the neighbour with a grunt. "I dunno. The marina? That shitty Riverside Docks rathole? Maybe there was something there he didn't want us to see."

Gordon caught his partner's eye. "Something like ... a boat?"

Both men reeled in the wake of that thought.

They walked heavily from the foyer into the noise of the street. Harvey scratched his hat. "Maybe he's the killer?"

"Harvey."

"What? Sally Sue's been saying he pushed that Kringle chick under the bus. The kid's obsessed with riddles. Maybe this is all some game to him, trying to prove to us how smart he is."

The thought felt foul in Gordon's mind, but he had to admit it wasn't such a long shot. "Still, it's not smart to murder people for a riddle."

"And drugs are bad," Harvey chimed. "But people still do 'em. People are dumb, Jim. They do dumb things. Especially smart people."

They found the squad car with a nice new red spray tag on the wheel, no kids in sight. Gordon rested his head against the seatback. He tipped his head to face Harvey in the blue and yellow gloom. "He can't be the Stitcher. Ed's a little odd, but I'm sure he's not homicidal."

"Yeah, well, either way, I got one guess as to where he is."

"Don't say it."

Harvey said it. "Where he belongs. Arkham goddamn Asylum."

* * *

He lay for a long time in the darkness.

Trapped below ground in the broken elevator cage and the deepening night, not a solitary mote of light offered reprieve to his straining eyes. Strange colours and shapes fired through his optic nerves, but Ed knew enough about sensory deprivation to know it was just that. Visual hallucinations as his brain grappled with the lack of information. It tricked him. Are you blind? Did that glass cut your eyes? But Ed touched the blood running warm down his face, touched a fingertip to his eyeball, and knew he was not blind. For all the good it did him now.

He inhaled the darkness. He exhaled the darkness. In time his sense of his own form began to loosen, making him infinitely tall, a part of the darkness itself, a pair of invisible lungs pumping shadow into shadow, a twitching pulse nothing more than a mouse scuttling between the walls of endless night.

Time was impossible to gauge in such a state. Ed thought mere seconds had passed, only to find himself huddled in one crumpled corner with no idea how he'd gotten there. Pain shivered through him with every tick of his heart. Fractured scapula, maybe, broken ribs. He wasn't sure what had happened to the rest of him. His right leg was numb, the left curled to his chest where he could feel the swelling around his patella.

He was very thirsty. He thought he should try calling for help, but his throat was dry. He thought he might try it anyway. Once upon a time, when he was a boy instead of a mouse, he had lied to his father and his father had hit him. BANG! Into the kitchen counter. But I'm not lying! he cried, tasting blood in his mouth. And his father had hit him again.

His father had hit him quite often after that. Yes sir, no sir! It's better to be polite, sir!

The memory of his father's face twisted in anger was a small thought. Just a small thought lost in the vacuum of nothingness which was the only thing that existed in the bottom of the elevator shaft. Don't touch me! he had shouted at Erin Ahn Vo, and she had hit him, and now he was here. He wanted to call for help, but in the darkness there was no reasoning with his fear.

Unable to stand and unwilling to shout, he was left with nothing to do but wait. A while later he found himself lying at a weird angle on the floor, his head titled downwards and his feet pointing up, a dull throb in his left leg. Again, he wasn't sure how he'd gotten there, but on the bright side, his thirst had been replaced by a terrible hunger. He'd already vomited twice, no idea where. All he could smell was mildew and vomit and old books, and the blood in his mouth.

He rolled onto his right knee, climbing the small mountain where the elevator floor had crumpled over the counterweights. Luckily those hadn't been above him, or they would have smashed through the ceiling and killed him. He was shaking almost too much to stand, and the moment he put weight on his left leg, it collapsed beneath him and dumped him hard back on the floor.

Rising unsteadily to all-fours, Ed wasn't sure, actually, that he was so lucky to be alive. He knew what was coming. Vo might leave him all night, she might leave him for days, but eventually she would return for him, and then she would sew his mouth shut and hang him up for the crows.

He jolted at a the slamming of a door very far away. Gathering himself in one blind corner of the cage he strained to hear her footsteps, at first very far away, now rapidly approaching.

She was here. She was here and she was going to kill him. Ed's spine pulled straight, his whole body trembling as every muscle strained. Colours popped in front of his eyes, white light falling in streaks that he at first took to be another part of the hallucination until he realised it was the stripes of the cage bars falling through the open ceiling hatch, lit by an intensifying torchlight.

A black shadow fell over him. He peered up through the gap in the ceiling, which ended just below the level of the ground floor. The cage bars barricading the shaft were wrenched aside in a harsh clatter of steel. Silver light streamed around Ed, illuminating the debris on the crumpled floor, but he himself was lost in shadow.

He heard her breath on the still air. Inhaling raspily through the nostrils, exhaling through the mouth. The breath of the whole world in her mouth. Her huge, blurred form dropped into the shaft with a shuddering thud, the flashlight discarded on the carpet.

Ed hit the wall in an attempt to make room for the killer. His broken shoulder blade caught on a bar and he cried out, even though he knew he shouldn't. Vo used the sound to take him by the throat, her breath quickening, gusting over his face in a wave of meat and sauce. He coughed, fighting to breathe, and she squeezed his throat so tightly that he fell to his knees to appease her, nothing he could give her but his total submission. Yes, sir!

She spoke to him for the first time. Her voice sounded like the throb of his frantic pulse. "You have a secret. What is it?"

With her crushing his throat there was no way he could answer. He simply hung there until she let go of him in disgust or realisation, he had no idea, no desire to know. She kicked him as he lay in a heap, choking, clouds of red boiling in his optic nerves.

He thought of Kristen. Such a funny thing that only last night he'd entertained the prospect of marrying her. Seemed a long way away now. He would have married her, he would have treated her super nice, just the way she deserved to be treated. And when they had kids, boy, they'd be the best kids around. He'd be so proud. Just the way a dad should be.

Ah, all very far away now. He meant nothing to Vo's little scheme to keep the Asylum closed. She probably wouldn't even bother hanging him. She'd leave him here so if her scheme worked, even if the Asylum was bulldozed, no one would ever find Ed. He'd rot down here for a hundred years, until everyone he'd ever known had died, and then he would be truly lost.

He flinched as Vo took him by the jaw. "No secrets, huh?"

She banged his head against the elevator floor and stood, a black mass of shadows unfurling through the cavity in the ceiling. She yanked the cage door shut with a bang and a click of the latch slotting into place.

By time her footsteps faded from the hall, Ed was deeply unconscious.

* * *

_**A/N:**__ Deary me. It appears events have turned pear-shaped for our bold wannabe detective. Let's hope he can find a way out alive and sane with just one chapter left._

_Excited for chapter 12? Disturbed by the Stitcher's taste in sweatpants? Want to tell me how you're jaded and disaffected from it all? That review button has your name on it, friend._


	12. Welcome To The Darkness

_**A/N:**__ Here we are, at last. The end. Wait! Not yet. You have to read on for that part._

_Enjoy, chums. It's been a hellova ride._

* * *

Chapter 12: Welcome to the Darkness

Somewhere in the hell of dreams, the dreams became reality. Ed stopped weeping apologies to Kristen and instead started whimpering at the vice-grip on his jaw.

A paler shadow shifted against the blackness all around him. Ed couldn't be sure, but if there were windows in the offices, it was perhaps approaching dawn.

Vo sat on his chest, a tiny glimmer of light catching the needle in her hand. Black thread like a hank of wire hung from the eye. Vo leaned low over Ed, crushing his already broken ribs into his lungs and his fractured scapula against the hard bottom of the elevator.

That was enough to wake him more than any thousand nightmares. He bucked wildly against Vo, and she slapped him with an open hand and cracked his head against the floor.

"You don't know any secrets, huh?" she spat at him as he lay there stunned. "Everyone tells me that. It's like they want this godforsaken place to reopen."

Shaking his head turned out to be a bad idea. Dizziness swept through him. Ed ran a tongue along his teeth. The whole left side of his face stung from the slap, but he couldn't feel any loose teeth. He offered up a breathless laugh. She had the needle and thread in hand. She was going to kill him after all. Whatever he said now, he'd better say it, 'cause it was a long time silent after this.

"What's – what tastes better than it smells?"

Vo doubled the thick thread through the needle and tied it off at the end. "You don't ask the questions here."

"It's a tongue."

She grunted, checking the light above her. Though it wasn't so much light as a minor absence of gloom.

"What kind of room has no doors or windows?"

The needle pierced his lip. Ed bucked, but Vo outweighed him by a hundred pounds, and her position on his chest was a strong one.

"A mushroom," he gasped, spitting blood.

Vo hesitated with the needle pricking Ed's upper lip. "I _am_ going to kill you, you know."

"What has a single eye, but cannot see?"

She hit him, hard, in the face. His head snapped back. Heat blossomed in his right eye. Ed blinked, tears flooding his eye, heat soaring through the right half of his face. The tenuous outline of Vo had faded almost to nil.

"You," she growled, and stuck the needle through his top lip.

Ed's spine bowed like a bow string. His chest heaved like a bellows, heedless of his ribs biting into his lungs, and he screamed for all he was worth. Vo ripped the thread tight, dragging one side of his mouth shut. Ed screamed anyway. He should have never shouted at his father. He should have never shouted at Kristen. He should have screamed. Screamed until the air burst from his wretched lungs and he spat blood and coughed gravel from his raw throat.

"Shut up!" Vo roared. She forced the needle down on Ed's lip and he twisted away from her, the needle dragging a hot line down his cheek instead. Vo slapped him so hard his ears rang. "Shut up!" she cried again, jumping to her feet. Her boot lodged in Ed's back. "Shut up, shut up, shut up God damn you!"

With a last miserable cough, Ed fell silent.

Vo pushed her hair back with a sigh. "Finally. None of the others gave me this much trouble. When it became clear they were too afraid of the mob to protest the Asylum, I sewed their mouths shut and that was it. They all had secrets. They all kept them."

In a voice not far short of a whimper, Ed said, "I have a secret."

Vo grunted. "Too late."

He dropped a hand over his blind right eye. Staring up at Vo framed in the storm-grey dawn light drifting through the elevator ceiling. "I lied to the GCPD. I wanted to catch you by myself."

"Yeah? Takes balls, kid."

"I know you're Erin Vo. You _were_ Aaron Vo, a psychiatric nurse in the intensive treatment ward. You didn't like the way patients were being treated here. You and Kym Katee and Nikolas Ozolinsh worked here together. All the victims worked here. They agreed with you that this place should never reopen. But none of them were game enough to speak against Maroni. They wouldn't speak, so you killed them and hung them as a warning that the Asylum should stay closed."

"Hanging is kind compared to what people went through here. You don't have the first idea the kind of torture chamber this place was."

Ed hardly heard her. "You nearly got me. I almost believed it was some mob thing. Almost." He smiled at her, even though she couldn't see it, and he couldn't see her. "But you were too obvious with your victims. Sooner or later, even without me, the GCPD will trace them back to Arkham. And then they'll be after you."

"Okay, you need to shut up now."

"You know what, Miss Vo? I did it. Even if I had to lie to do it. I found the Stitcher by myself."

Vo dropped to her knees beside him. She pinned his throat with one hand. "Great story, kid. Pity you were such a dumbass about it. No one's ever gonna know you caught me."

Ed clutched the sharp bit of bone in his palm. It felt like the humorus of some anciently-expired feline. As Vo went to straddle him, he brought the bone up and speared it into her thigh.

Vo shrieked. She grasped at the bone sticking inch-deep in her leg. "You sonova bitch!"

Unsure if he was smiling, Ed bit off the thread between his teeth, pulled the needle free from his lip, and stabbed it into Vo's eye.

"Am I?" he asked her, as she howled and flailed against the elevator wall. He watched her, unfeeling, as her fumbling for the needle succeeded only in rupturing the eyeball and spilling vitreous gel down her cheek.

He didn't feel like himself. In fact, he didn't feel like anybody. Maybe Jim Gordon. If Jim Gordon had just had his ass handed to him in the bottom of a pitch black elevator shaft.

As Vo continued to struggle, Ed found the highest point on the floor. Crawling to his feet, standing as tall as he was able, his shoulders were flush with the topside of the elevator. He could just peer out onto the ground floor, where indeed a murky ambience sharpened the definition of the walls from the furniture.

Should he hurry? He heard Vo sob and knew she would certainly kill him if she caught him. But she had planned to do that anyway. Ed got both hands on the top of the elevator, and pushed. His fractured scapula failed him, and he slid back down into the darkness.

"Come here, you bastard!" Vo cried, slamming towards him. Ed hit the ground, and Vo went flying over him, only her boot catching his hip. She hit the elevator wall with a thud of breaking nostril cartilage, and Ed scraped himself from the floor and tried once again for freedom.

This time he used his good arm to hold onto the cage bars. He had little to brace his feet against until Vo lunged for him, and he kicked her in the face and pulled himself from the elevator. There, on the sweet, blessed mouldy carpet of the ground floor, he found a three-legged chair and stuffed it into the hole in the elevator. It fit poorly but stuck fast, and Ed picked himself up against the cage bars and slapped them shut.

He was fifty feet away by time he remembered the cage latch. It wouldn't stop Vo forever, but it would slow her. Ed's left leg hampered him badly, and he only hobbled across the floor. The lack of vision in his right eye was startling. His eyelid was swollen shut, the skin around his eye so broken and distended that he could not even tell if an eye he still possessed. The left, blinking furiously, gave him a hash of blurred grey images. There was not enough light yet to see well by. But like so much in his life at that moment, it would do.

There was no going back for the latch. Ed reached the double doors at the end of the offices and shoved them open. The clang of the cage bars being drawn open boomed through the office. Ed's heartrate doubled in a second. He had another one – two – three rooms to traverse before he reached the outside world. Even that was assuming there were guards nearby who didn't shoot him on sight. But even being shot by a guard was preferable to death at Vo's hands.

He slammed the doors behind him, throwing a chair against them but not daring to waste time doing more. There was nothing for it, no strategy, no hiding, nowhere to hide in the long empty hall he had stumbled into. Beyond that was the record room, where he could hide for a while but not forever, and then the main room, and the foyer, and the forecourt, and Jesus Christ man, run, run, run!

He stumbled into a run as the office doors exploded outwards and Vo stormed into the hallway. Ed shot into the record room, a mass of pain running on the wire of a pulse, through the rows of shelves, his long legs chewing up the ground but nothing compared to Vo who towered over him, slamming her way through the shelves, sending books and files flying and entire shelves toppling crashing to the floor.

"Help!" Ed cried. The doors to the main hall were still a mile away. His knee burst with pain at every step. "Someone, help!"

Vo's fingertips grazed his collar. He spurred himself faster, but her breath snorted hot after him, her pounding footsteps all he could hear. In the gloom of the record room, he barely saw the doors to the main hall jerk open. He recognised Gordon's voice from the blurred figure.

"Put your hands in the air! Edward Nygma, you're under arrest!"

What?

"Not me!" he croaked. "It's her! She hanged those people! Erin Vo! She was a nurse here! Jim! Her name was Aaron Vo! She's the killer!"

Harvey barked, "Don't you ever shut up? He said you're under arrest! Now stop before I shoot!"

"It's her!" Ed shouted. His voice grated from his bloody throat. "I swear, detective, it's her!"

Suddenly he saw it, across the vast distance separating him from Gordon and Harvey spilling into the record room. As dull as his left eye was in the lingering darkness, he saw the light spark in Gordon's eye, the twist of Harvey's mouth, the crystallised reflection of Vo reaching out to grab him. He was running between the shelves, Vo right behind him; even if they wanted to, there was nothing short of shooting them both that Gordon or Harvey could do to help.

Ed's heel screeched on the threadbare carpet. He let his knee go out from under him. Vo flew over his head. She kicked him in the back as she went, stumbling, and as she tried to catch her balance Ed rose and slammed his fist into her pivoting jaw with every bit of hate for her he had accumulated in the long hours of the night.

It turned out to be a lot of hate. Vo dropped like a sack of shit off a bridge.

Ed stared panting over her writhing form at Gordon and Harvey in the doorway, their guns trained on his chest. He licked the blood from his lips.

"I swear to God, Ed," said Harvey. He shifted from foot to foot but did not lower his gun. "The first thing comes outta your mouth is a riddle, I'm going to shoot."

* * *

Luckily for Ed, the first words out of his mouth once Erin Vo was on the ground were "Thank you" followed shortly by "I can explain" as Gordon clapped him in handcuffs.

"Sorry about this, man," Jim said, sounding as if he meant it, as he helped Ed with an arm around his waist into the clear grey dawn.

There, in the reedy morning light, Ed stopped, the Asylum a mess of black and muddy greys to his aching eye. He didn't care. He didn't care about the crows perched along the stone balustrade. He didn't care about the handcuffs biting into his wrists. It was enough to breathe.

Gordon he took one good look at the tender angle of Ed's knee, the blood staining his shirt, his swollen eye, and the black thread still hanging from his lip, and swore. The trio of security guards headed into the mansion recoiled from the forensic. "Jesus, Ed. What the hell happened to you?"

Ed rubbed his good eye. Everything remained blurry. "Can I sit down?"

Gordon nodded. "Yeah, of course." He steered Ed to the fanning steps leading down onto the forecourt.

"And could you possibly cuff my hands in front of me? I'm pretty sure my shoulder blade is broken."

Gordon obliged. They sat there together a few moments in the grey dawn, Gordon watching Ed, Ed watching an oyster-shell pink light the sky to the east.

"I should get in there and help them bring out Vo," Gordon said at length.

"Yeah."

"Good work on that, by the way. We were way off. Harvey still thought it was Fish."

Ed smiled, leaning against the cold stone railing. He just wanted to sleep. "I'm sorry I lied to you."

"Yeah, well." Gordon shrugged. "Maybe you techs don't get enough credit. It's a busy place to work, you know. A lot goes unappreciated."

"I wanted to be a hero. You know. Like you."

Gordon froze halfway to a stand. He sat back down promptly. "Ed, I'm no hero."

"In Gotham you are."

It was hard to tell, with his vision so compromised, but Ed thought Gordon smiled at that. "Thanks. But I'm not, you know. And you didn't do so bad. Maybe, just, ahh. Maybe pack a gun next time you go hunting killers. You look like shit, man."

Ed breathed a laugh. "I feel it."

Gordon patted his shoulder. "You did good. Sit tight. We'll sort this out in no time."

The warmth in Ed's chest stayed with him all the way back to the station.

* * *

Epilogue

Of Fish's guards, Mickey had escaped via the sewer drain, back across the bridge and to a safe hideout in a warehouse on the riverbank. Alvaro took a wrong turn to the bathroom and found himself on the forecourt just as a security patrol went by. Interestingly, Alvaro's work history showed he was a contractor for a demolition company based in the southern Gotham peninsula. Major Crimes has not yet released him for bail.

Erin Ahn Vo, a.k.a. Aaron An Vo, former Arkham Asylum nurse, was charged with nine counts of murder, nine counts of abduction, one count of grievous bodily harm, five counts of break and enter, and one theft of a boat. Her full history is still being investigated. Her nursing licence has been revoked, and she had been moved to Blackgate Penitentiary until her case sees court.

Kristen Kringle came to see Ed on his second week in Gotham General. He was busy with a game of bridges at the time.

She rapped on his door. Since he was still technically under arrest, a uniformed officer sat sleeping in the visitor's chair. The uniform snored and Ed looked up from the puzzle book.

"Oh," he said when he saw her. He had a new pair of glasses, though a thick swab of gauze covered his right eye. "Oh, it's you! I heard you were awake. Um, have a seat. Wherever you like."

Kristen perched on the foot of the bed. "You don't have many cards."

"Just two," said Ed. He plucked the cards from the bedside table and passed them to her. Her blonde hair was loose over her shoulders, and she looked awfully cute in her white hospital gown. Ed smoothed the front of his own gown. If only he'd brought a tie...

"One from Captain Essen, nice," Kristen flipped open the second card. Her smile faltered. "And the second from Harvey Bullock. _Get well soon, you asshole. _Well. At least he's frank."

Ed replaced the cards on the table. "Miss Mooney sent me flowers."

"The irises?" Kristen coughed. "Wow. You must've made an impression on her."

"Yeah." Ed chewed his lip. "I think I'll send her a thumb. You know, from the morgue. Make her think that I'm dead. It may be easier."

"Than being romantically pursued by a mafia don?" Kristen laughed, her hair bouncing on her shoulders. Even if she was bruised, and cut, and her arm in sling, she was beautiful. Ed drew his knees up to his chest. "Say, Edward. I heard what happened, more or less. That twit Sally Sue telling people you pushed me under the bus. I set her straight this morning. You didn't push me. You were trying to warn me."

Ed blinked back a tear. "You don't know how much it means for you to remember that."

"Of course I remember. Plus, the CCTV footage proves it." Kristen gazed at the floor, her mouth pulling this way and that. Her voice softened. "We had a good night, didn't we?"

"Before you were hit by that bus, yeah."

Kristen tossed her head back. It was her same old wild horse look, but this time Ed didn't think it was aimed at him. That was just Kristen. Wild. Nervy. Exactly the way he loved her. "You know, I've been thinking. You're a pretty good guy. Smart. Hard-working. Romantic."

Ed bit the air. Was she saying what he thought she was saying? "Do you mean – you – if they don't – if they don't throw me in prison for forging documents and stealing post mortem reports, maybe we could go out again some time?"

Kristen breathed a laugh. She shook her head. "No. Not that."

"Oh." Ouch.

She eyed him coolly as he struggled not to cry. She leant forward and tried to take his hand, but he held it against his chest away from her. She sighed. "You're just not my type, Edward. But that doesn't mean you're not a good person."

"I – I could be your type. You just have to give me a chance. What's-"

"No," she said, and she stood, and smiled. "There's someone out there for you. It's not me. But there's someone. Waiting for you."

And despite his sincere protests, she left him there alone.

* * *

_The End._

_Thoughts? Feels? Care to share them?_

_Thanks so much for following and supporting this story. Writing it made me feel like an enormous nerd. I learnt so much about all things Batman, and it barely feels like the tip of the iceberg. The fandom is amazing, you guys included. If you want to hear another Gotham story from me, let me know. You have been so damn beautiful._

_On that note, take care, if you've enjoyed the story I'd love a review, and here's a riddle just to up the story's quota: the manufacturer doesn't need me, the buyer doesn't want me, and the user doesn't know he's using me. What am I?_

_Peace out!_


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